


not the most honest means of travel

by irnan



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Pre-OT3, Romantic Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-09-20 08:23:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9482678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: “She ran the red rooms,” Barnes said angrily. “She was Karpov’s right hand for god alone knows how long. If there’s anyone left in the world who might reasonably be expected to know every single trigger ever placed in my brain, it’s her. And you want me to walk out into a situation where –”“She’s the only person left in the world who might reasonably be expected to know how to clean them out,” said Romanov.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure, I've been looking for an excuse to do this with Natasha's backstory basically since I wrote "crown and anchor". Hahaha! _Finally_. In spite of what the summary would like you to think, there isn't really any plot here at all; it's mostly just about everybody's feelings.

 

**I.**

Barnes said no at first, but Agent Romanov was undeterred.

“She blew up a school full of children to try and get to me,” she said, her voice flat and emotionless and her expression blank. T’Challa had seen Romanov calm, composed, implacable. This was closer to robotic. “She’ll try again, and more people will die. Whatever she’s ultimately after, people will die. That’s how she operates.”

“I’m not arguing that,” said Barnes. “But you don’t need me to fix it.”

“I need someone. I need backup.”

“She ran the red rooms,” Barnes said angrily. “She was Karpov’s right hand for god alone knows how long. If there’s anyone left in the world who might reasonably be expected to know every single trigger ever placed in my brain, it’s her. And you want me to walk out into a situation where –”

“She’s the only person left in the world who might reasonably be expected to know how to clean them out,” said Romanov.

That silenced him. He rocked back on his heels a little, his eyes wide, and his throat worked as he swallowed. T’Challa, sitting quietly in the corner of the conference room, shifted, uncrossing his legs and leaning forwards to rest his elbows on his knees.

“It’s a reckless short cut,” he said.

“Short cut, or the only way?” said Romanov. She did not look at him. “It’s not just Barnes’ triggers. What if I have them too?”

“Then taking the field against this agent is a doubly stupid thing to do,” said T’Challa. “There are other ways. Captain Rogers –”

“No,” said Romanov. “Nor Stark.”

“Stark has the resources, the firepower you would need.”

Romanov shook her head. “You don’t understand Tony,” she said. “He’s not stable. He put a _child_ onto a battlefield between the two most dangerous killers on the planet.” It gave T’Challa a jolt to realise she meant herself and Barnes. Was she boasting? That did not seem in character. “If I’m right – if Markova wants the serum – Stark is the last person who should come anywhere near this situation. She’s KGB. Using people who run on Tony’s particular combination of paranoia and megalomania is child’s play to her.”

“The man’s not a monster,” said Barnes.

“He’s trying not to be,” said Romanov. “But Tony is nothing if not easily manipulated.”

That wasn’t robotic; that was bitter and resentful. T’Challa wasn’t sure it was an improvement, but whatever bad blood lay between Romanov and Stark these days, it was best not to stir it. “And Captain Rogers?”

“She wants the serum,” Romanov repeated. “I won’t risk his involvement either.”

“Sentiment.” T’Challa smiled a little. For a moment he almost stopped worrying about Romanov’s state of mind.

“Logic,” she returned coolly. “The more personal it gets for Steve the more instinctively he reacts, and Steve’s basic instinct is to throw himself at whatever’s pissing him off and punch it till it goes away.”

Barnes snorted. “You’re not wrong,” he said. For the first time since Romanov had begun to explain Irina Markova, he sat down in one of the chairs, rather heavily. The white sweater T’Challa had given him made him seem pale, washed out; there was weariness in his movements and the lines of his face, emphasised by the empty left sleeve, though it was neatly pinned. “But you don’t really think Irina can clean the triggers out, do you.”

Romanov sighed. Then she too sat down at the table, folding her hands together on the table top. She rubbed the fingers of her right hand against the palm of her left. She was watching her own fingers rather than Barnes’ face. “There’s a good chance she could, but not much chance we could make her.”

“But?” Barnes said intently.

She looked up at him. “The serum.”

He went very still. T’Challa said, “Meaning?”

“The serum,” Romanov repeated. “Howard Stark’s perfected serum. I’ve been over the Project Rebirth files again – I know ‘em by heart by now – it cured Steve’s asthma, his heart condition. The chair alters our brain chemistry, puts scars in the tissue itself. Why wouldn’t the serum heal that just like any other ailment we have at the time?”

“System re-set,” said Barnes.

“Exactly.”

“You seem very sure that you have triggers,” said T’Challa.

Romanov shrugged. “I’m sure there’s something. Memory loss, if nothing else.” She didn’t elaborate, and it seemed rude to push her: not least, because he had no desire to scare her off. The best way to do damage control, here, was to make sure they trusted him.

For long thoughtful moments they were all silent. Barnes’ breathing was oddly loud in T’Challa’s ears. He and Romanov were watching each other like a couple of cats brought in to the same home and told to get along or else. T’Challa saw them suddenly as a kind of mirror of each other – or no – they were the same, down to the bone: the exhaustion and the bitter resignation and the naked inability to ever, ever give up. He’d seen some of that in Rogers, too…

At last Barnes spoke. “Let’s say I help you,” he said. “What’s the plan? I don’t intend to kill anyone. There’s enough blood on my hands.”

“Not even in self-defence?”

Barnes looked over at T’Challa sharply. Then he said, “All right, I won’t _set out_ to kill anyone.”

“Can you live with it if I do?” said Romanov.

“I think it’s the wrong move,” said Barnes. “I think after everything the last thing either of us needs is to commit another murder.”

Romanov didn’t flinch, but T’Challa suspected that in her case the absence of a reaction was what tended to prove the barb had hit home. He sighed.

“If you apprehend her,” he said, “I can deal with her as I did with Zemo. And as with Zemo, I will ensure that nothing… goes wrong.”

Romanov looked at him at last. Steady green eyes, and that blank unreadable face; for the first time it occurred to T’Challa to wonder how old she was, and how long it had been since she had been made into – what she was. He had unsettled her, or surprised her at least, in Berlin; now it was her turn to unsettle him, and quite suddenly he remembered that he had betrayed her to Ross, in a sense, and that perhaps it was as well to be wary of the consequences of that. He held steady, unease churning in his stomach.

“That’s fair,” she said at last. “But if I think it’s the only way I won’t hesitate.”

“I want safeguards,” said Barnes. “Some way that you can track us – if I’m triggered – bring me down.”

“You’ll need your prosthetic replaced,” said T’Challa. “We can outfit it with a tracker – perhaps a way to knock you out.”

Barnes nodded, turned back to Romanov. “Under that condition, _vdova_ , I’ll help you.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

+++

When T’Challa had left Natasha stood up to pour herself another glass of water, turning away from Barnes, busying her hands. Those steady grey eyes made her jumpy, the same way Steve had made her jumpy sometimes at SHIELD: they were much more observant than most people realised, and they judged you. The water gurgled as she poured it, the lip of the jug clinking against the glass. She was so tired her hands weren’t quite steady. She hadn’t slept properly in forever. The dreams, a perennial problem ever since Odessa, had come thick and fast since Rio, more confusing than ever, worse than DC or Germany. Yet when she closed her eyes she saw the school again, the blown-out walls, the rubble –

“What were you doing in Rio?”

She didn’t jump. It was a near thing. “Teaching ballet.”

He made a funny noise; after a moment she realised it was something close to amusement. Maybe even fond.

“What did you do for two years straight while Steve was killing himself trying to find you?”

“Worked construction and read books,” Barnes said, refusing to rise to the bait. “Tried to make sure he wouldn’t get caught in the crosshairs when someone like Zemo finally turned up.”

“I think you were the one in the crosshairs there.”

“Yeah,” said Barnes. “I’m the perpetual damsel in distress in the great comic book of Steve’s life.”

Natasha choked back a surprised cackle, and when she turned back to look at him his face had softened, as if – as if her laughter had made him like her.

“So why did you decide I’m your best bet here? Don’t give me justifications. They were smart, but I’d prefer the truth.”

God. Look at him: he’d gone back under so soon after Siberia that his injuries had barely had time to heal, and he was pale and tired, his body seeming lopsided without the prosthetic left arm. He needed a shave and a haircut and a week’s worth of sleep, and probably a few square meals as well. Natasha knew he could cook, but she’d seen the pictures of the Bucharest apartment... And here he was, agreeing to – and his first reaction had not been, _I don’t want to die or be arrested_ , or even _let someone else do it, I’ve been through enough_ , but _I don’t want to make it worse. I don’t want to hurt more people_.

God, she wished he would stop making her trust him.

“Irina brought this fight to me,” she said. She didn’t sit down again. The glass of water was cool and heavy in her hand; unconsciously she gestured with it. “I know better than to think she’s going to stop. If there was anyone else I thought I could trust with this without the consequences being almost as bad as letting Irina herself have the serum, I would. I would fly to New York tomorrow and hand all the intel I’ve shown you to Tony. Or to Steve, wherever he is. But there’s only one way to end this, and I don’t trust either of them to take it. She’d have Tony by the balls within twenty-four hours. She’d kill Steve.”

“Besides which, you’re pissed off at the both of them.”

Somewhere underneath the numbing exhaustion blanketing most of her emotions, Natasha’s temper stirred. “And I’m pissed off at the both of them,” she said. “Tony – after Leipzig, Tony accused me of having been Steve’s inside man all along.” That still made her want to throw something. “I walk out onto that battlefield and try and de-escalate a situation _he created_ in the only possible way, and he accuses me…” She waved a hand, as if brushing it off. It was her own fault; she should have known better. But it stung all the same. Tony had known her for a long time now. “I’m tired of cleaning up Tony Stark’s messes. I’ve been doing it on and off for nearly eight years, and it’s getting old.”

“And Steve?”

Thinking about Steve didn’t just sting. It ached through her whole body, like the aftermath of a beating. “Steve doesn’t get to pick and choose when he trusts me and when he doesn’t.”

This time Barnes laughed. It was a hoarse, unpractised, smoker’s-cough-y sound, but it was sincerely amused for all that. “You’re just gonna have to get used to that.”

Natasha looked at him.

“If you don’t agree with him about something he just stops talking to you about it. He’s always been that way. He used to lie to me about enlisting… during the USO tour, he never replied to any of my letters so I wouldn’t know he wasn’t still in Brooklyn. He’d rather freeze you out than fight about it.”

Oh.

That… that made her feel better. It was stupid, but it did. Made it less personal, less as though she were the one who had screwed up their friendship and Steve’s actions had only been the logical consequence. Barnes could tell, she thought. Something softened around his eyes; for a moment they looked at one another and knew they were in complete sympathy.

That was probably why she told the truth at last. “I’m tired,” she said. Did she sound and look as defeated as she felt, or was lying such a part of her she couldn’t shake it even now? “I’m of having to fight all the damn time. I’m tired of remaking myself, over and over, of making the wrong choices every time and watching it all fall apart around my knees. I defected; I thought I went straight; I thought I’d built myself a – a place to stand. Given myself a purpose. But SHIELD turned out to be Hydra, and then Tony turned out to be exactly who I… made myself forget he was. And now I can’t even hide behind a photoveil, because Markova – I don’t – I don’t know how she found me.” Natasha sighed. “I’m _tired_. Steve’ll never put that shield down. He’ll never walk away from any kind of fight. And right now that is – that is all that I want to do: walk away, and stay gone… And I thought – if anyone would understand…”

“It’d be me,” said Barnes. “And you were right, as usual.” He smiled at her, a little quirk of his lips. “I understand.”

Natasha found she wasn’t relieved; she had known, after all. But hearing him say it gave her the courage to ask the question she should have started with, hours ago.   

“Can I ask you what happened in Siberia?”

He drew a breath. “You don’t know?”

“No. I left Leipzig and I did not look back.” Not to say that she didn’t sometimes regret it. Life was very dull these days. But she was too angry to apologise for refusing to make herself a criminal again, and too stubborn to apologise for putting her friends above her principles, and much too tired to walk back out onto that battlefield that Steve refused to leave.

Barnes said, “And if I say the wrong thing, you’ll leave Wakanda and not look back?”

Natasha shrugged.

“I killed Howard and Maria Stark.” He said it quick and harsh and blunt, as if to linger over it would tear something in him, and it was better get it over with.

Natasha felt sucker-punched. She stumbled; the glass rattled on the table when she put it down; boneless she slid back into her chair, cold all over. “It – oh, god.”

Disbelieving, Barnes said, “You knew too?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. Her hands were clenched so tightly on the arms of the chair that her fingers ached. “I thought – Zola implied it to Steve and me. But I couldn’t see why he’d send _you_ to cause a car accident, it didn’t make sense. I never really thought…”

“Howard had the serum with him.”

“Oh.” That, on the other hand, did make sense. Suddenly her head came up. “Tony –”

Barnes made a movement, not quite avoiding her gaze, not quite meeting it either. Natasha stared at him. All of a sudden the bruises and the lost, grim look, and his missing arm, and the way he’d hidden himself down here took on new significance… she was breathing fast, anxious. She didn’t want to know.

She already knew.

“ _Tony_ did this to you?” She’d thought – she’d assumed Zemo, the other assets. Tony had _ripped his arm off_ , had beaten him – she felt sick. Barnes had not chosen to do it, had never wanted… It could just as easily have been her. They were weapons, tools, interchangeable. How could Tony not have understood that?

Tony was unstable and self-obsessed, with very little empathy or compassion for anyone outside of himself, anyone who did not resemble him. Natasha knew that. She’d told Nick so herself, years ago. She still, somehow, had not expected this brutality of him.

God, what had he done to Steve?

“What did you think he’d do?” The bitter twist to Barnes’ mouth suggested he felt he deserved it.

“I didn’t get a choice either,” she said. “Bruce didn’t, Clint didn’t.” Tony himself hadn’t, in some ways.

“His _parents_ ,” he said.

Two weather-worn, weed-choked little headstones in a badly-kept graveyard outside of Stalingrad flashed up before her mind’s eye; she jumped up, flinging the chair away with a sudden violent movement. Should she have driven up to Moscow three years ago and murdered every surviving member of the KGB over those stones? There was no excuse for that kind of cruelty, none. “Twenty years later! Don’t even start.” She was too angry to stand still. She wanted Tony here so she could wrap a hand around his throat and shake him, demand what the hell made her and Bruce and Clint so different: compassion for all, unless it touched Tony himself. Oh yes, that was Stark through and through.

She was being unfair. She was being viciously, disgustingly unfair. His _parents_. _Her_ parents. Her childhood, and that of every other girl who had passed through Irina Markova’s merciless hands: concrete training halls and cells with blood crusted on their hands and bruises on their faces and bodies, and here some cosseted little billionaire couldn’t deal with his own grief long enough to keep from beating another human being half to death as punishment for something he could never have prevented. Barnes couldn’t even look at her. Exhausted, hunted, his shoulders were curved in like a boy who’d been thrashed too often, trying to hide, his elbow resting on his thigh, hand hanging down between his knees. His untidy hair fell around his face. Something soft and tender and protective was closing up Natasha’s throat, something that wanted her to run her hands through that thick dark hair and kiss his temple and comfort his hurts.

How many times had it been her, curled into a chair and tearing herself up with guilt? _I won’t tell you it’s not your fault_ , Laura had used to say. _That’s not for me to decide. I just want you to remember that you are more than what they made you_.

“Are you OK?” she asked at last.

His head came up. “Am _I_ OK?”

“He was your friend. Howard.”

He stared at her. Then, something in him breaking, he said, “Yeah, yeah he was,” and ran his shaking hand over his wet face. Natasha brought him water, touched that he would let her see him weep, and sat on the table next to him, feeling his body heat on her skin, offering comfort if he wanted it, until at last his breathing steadied and he looked up at her and smiled a little, watery and grateful.

+++

The new prosthetic looked much like the old; T’Challa’s scientists had been reluctant to cause Barnes more pain by removing what was left of the first one, and had simply repaired the shoulder and fitted the new arm to the socket thus created. It had not, judging from T’Challa’s worried frown, been a painless process even so.

“I owe him a debt,” he said to Natasha, who dug her nails into the ball of her thumb before she answered.

“I understand.”

He meant it. He was sincere in wanting to help Barnes – entirely sincere, too, in his desire to avoid the serum falling into the hands of someone like Markova. He was fundamentally a good man, and that far Natasha trusted him. But in her experience, people who let their anger and their need for vengeance overtake their better natures once would do it again if provoked in the same way. Much as she disliked looking at the Winter Soldier from the wrong end of a rifle scope, she disliked him letting T’Challa build safeguards into the prosthetic even more: chipped and tagged like a wild animal let out on safari. But the Soldier had always been more matter-of-fact about their situation than she.

Anyway. The new arm looked and functioned much as the old had, though Barnes’ shoulder and back were sore for a day or so after the operation. And while Natasha kept an eye on the news channels anxiously and swapped information with countless old contacts at once, he found the time to shave and have his hair cut. When she met him in the hangar the morning they left she almost didn’t recognise him. Her whole body jolted. Here was not the Winter Soldier, hunted and silent and grim; here was Bucky Barnes: older, wiser, badly hurt, but nevertheless recognisable as the man who laughed out of those old recordings in the Smithsonian – the only human being, as far as Natasha knew, to ever make Steve Rogers laugh out loud, or even crack a proper smile.

“I figured, if we’re using photoveils, I might as well shave,” he said when he saw her surprise.

“Yeah. Of course.”

He still seemed tired, and he had a habit of drawing his shoulders in, moving slowly – gone the swagger, the speed and grace she knew he was capable of. But she thought it was a good sign that he wasn’t hiding from his own reflection anymore.

Then again, who was she to patronise him about it. Natasha had been shaving her own hair off and wearing wigs on a regular basis since long before she’d come to SHIELD.   

+++

Berlin; Vienna; Sokovia. They followed Zemo, chasing the same leads he had chased, searching for the prize he had been too caught up in vengeance to care about. Once Natasha and Barnes saw the pattern it was easy to break away and follow their own leads, searching for the turnings Zemo had ignored, the details he had found unimportant.

Kiev, for example.

“You’re asking a great deal,” Masha said, lighting another cigarette. “The file itself was one thing.” She nodded at Barnes, who stood leaning against the wall behind Natasha’s chair like a bodyguard, looming and silent. “The details of each individual mission are another.”

“I know that,” said Natasha. “Can you at least get us started?”

Masha snorted. “And then? Who knocks on my door when you’ve gone, searching for you?”

“Irina Markova,” said Barnes bluntly.

Masha drew a long drag on her cigarette, holding the smoke in her lungs for what seemed like hours. “Well.” She was afraid. Masha, of all people, was afraid.

“Unless we get there first,” Natasha said. “Unless we find what she wants and eliminate it and her.”

“Irina is not easily _eliminated_.”

“That’s the risk we’re running,” said Barnes.

“Why _bother_ ,” said Masha, exasperated, but she’d known Natasha too long to really expect an answer. “Oh, very well. It may take a day or two.”

“We can wait,” said Natasha.

+++

It took a very special kind of cynicism to label a project like this “Operation Rebirth”. Or a deeply entrenched hatred: Natasha, as she flipped through the papers Masha had brought them, found herself thinking of Anton Vanko more than once. When had Stark begun his work on the new, perfected serum, and how had Karpov learned of it? But she couldn’t be sure if the timeline fit. Besides, it hardly mattered anymore.

Half the papers were printed with unintelligible formulas, tables of comparisons between substances and combinations of drugs that meant nothing to either Natasha or Barnes. Some few, thankfully incomplete, sections appeared to detail experiments with unfinished formulas and the frankly awful fate of the test subjects. There were minutes of meetings, and long debates over the usefulness or otherwise of acquiring the formula, and the relative success of the Winter Soldier vs. the Red Room programme over the years; and a disk with endless hours of footage – reports by Soviet scientists, spies at SHIELD, diplomats; Karpov had had an obsession with chronicling everything.

“Irina’s name doesn’t come up much,” said Barnes.

“No,” Natasha agreed, throwing another fistful of papers across the table. It was well past midnight, and the weak electric bulbs in the little apartment were making her eyes water the longer she tried to read. The haze of cigarette smoke wasn’t helping, but Natasha found the smell and the rasp in her throat and the nicotine flashes strangely comforting, like a sense-memory of childhood. “It’s odd. It can’t be a coincidence that she’s crawled out of the woodwork after all these years just after Zemo stirred up all that dust about the serum and the Winter Soldier programme. But if I’m reading these right she was arguing _against_ it, in the Eighties.”

“The Winter Soldier programme was always Lukin’s playground,” said Barnes. “Irina ran the Red Rooms. Karpov, in theory, was in charge of the both of them…”

“They hated each other,” Natasha said. “Lukin and Irina.” She didn’t know who’d told her, when she’d learned this. She just knew it was true.

Barnes nodded slowly. “And if Irina’s alive…”

What about Lukin. Yes. Could this – was this maybe not about them at all, but a private little war continued? She and Barnes and all the others like them had never been anything but pawns to Department X. It would be a mistake to discount the possibility, to ascribe to themselves an importance they simply didn’t have to these people…

“Come on,” said Barnes. “Come on, it’s two a.m., let’s get some sleep.”

+++

“By the way,” he said, “how did you know I was in Wakanda? If you haven’t spoken to Steve, I mean.”

Natasha shrugged. “I knew you wouldn’t want to hurt anyone else. I couldn’t imagine where else you’d be safe.”

Barnes looked at her curiously. “You knew that, did you?”

“You weren’t hiding in that dump in Bucharest because you liked the food, were you?”

“Hmm,” he said. Then he said, “For your information, I _did_ like the food,” and she laughed in spite of herself.

+++

They both drank their coffee the same way – black – and the first morning on the road he’d poured it for her without asking, set it down in front of her when she’d come through and not even checked to make sure she liked it black. That was one thing. That was something he might conceivably have picked up from Steve. _Oh yeah Natasha drinks it like that too_. Unlikely. Nevertheless possible.

But there was no explanation at all for the absent-minded way he’d offered her his plate at dinner one night, and the equally absent-minded way she’d picked the mushrooms out of the pasta sauce, as if she’d been doing it for years. 

+++

They had two possible leads, after Kiev: a company in Rostov that had once been a front for a KGB facility, and might well still be, or what seemed to be a safehouse in Stalingrad.

“Volgograd,” said the girl in the ticket booth.

“Sorry?” said Natasha, staring.

“Volgograd,” she repeated, laughing. “You sound like my grandmother. Been away long?”

“Yes,” Natasha said. “A very long time.”

The train ride seemed endless: first north towards Moscow, and then a curve across half the continent, or so it felt, rattling south again to Sta- to Volgograd. Barnes had surprised her by insisting on a detour to a bookshop before they left; then she remembered what he’d said about reading after DC.

“Favourite book?” she asked suddenly. He was deep into a copy of _Nicholas Nickleby_ ; the way the corners of his mouth were curling upwards as he read made her bored with her newspaper.

It took him a moment or ten. Then he looked up. “Oh. Uh. There’s a few of those.”

“Steve’s always reading, too.”

“Yeah, he used to steal my books.”

Natasha laughed. Barnes smiled too, relaxed, reminiscent.

“I s’pose you’ve got an e-reader.”

“No,” she said, surprised. “GPS.”

“Oh, of course.” He glanced out of the window thoughtfully. “Nice to have a whole library to carry around in your pocket, though.”

“Oh, definitely. But you have to charge them all the damn time. It’s not like I only read for ten minutes a day.”

He laughed. “What’s your favourite book, then?”

Tolstoy. She didn’t know where that came from; she’d always avoided reading Russian lit. If she was going to be an American, best to be an American. Besides, what was next, _Crime and Punishment_? Hah.

“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s probably a few.”

He smiled again, and Natasha packed her newspaper away and pulled her book out instead.

+++

Volgograd – Stalingrad – Tsaritsyn. There was always something otherworldly about train stations late at night: the lights too bright, the shadows falling somehow differently, the deserted halls echoing in new ways. Natasha shifted from foot to foot, staring up at the high ceiling of the main hall, wishing it was rush hour. But the concourse was empty of people, and the silence left her feeling unsteady and off-balance.

Barnes touched her shoulder. “You’re nervous,” he said in Russian. “What’s the matter?”

Natasha shivered in surprise, hearing him speak her mother tongue so fluently. His accent was terrible, but it was surprisingly comforting to remember that she did not _have_ to speak English with him; that she could lay that mask aside, if she so chose. Perhaps because of that, she answered him at once, without pausing to weigh the consequences. “My parents are buried here. Just outside the city. I don’t – I don’t remember them.”

The light touch became a steady, comforting grip. He was much taller than she; she rather liked looking up at him, and didn’t know why. “I’m sorry.”

“She tried to kill me,” Natasha said. “And then she keeps a safe house not thirty miles from my parents’ graves…”

“Yeah.”

“Russia’s _huge_. But no: it’s all here. Day’s drive away from each other.”

“It doesn’t look good, does it.”

“No,” Natasha said. “No, Soldier, it sure as hell doesn’t.”

+++

The safe house could not have looked more conspicuous if that had been the architect’s explicit brief. It was a comparatively old house in a fairly wealthy residential area, surrounded by a bit of overgrown garden and a wrought-iron fence; there were two stories and a front porch and wide windows, and something about it drew Natasha’s eye irresistibly. It just didn’t _belong_ there, and Natasha did not mean the comparative neglect, looking around at the other perfectly tended gardens, the smart coats of paint. It was just that the house should be – it ought to be –

Natasha didn’t know. Maybe Irina had built it to laugh at her. Natasha wanted to stamp her foot and throw something.

They staked it out for a day, but no one came up to it and nothing moved inside it, unless one counted the neighbourhood cats that slunk through the garden every now and again. At last, when night had properly fallen and most of the lights in the other houses had been turned off, families all down the street going safely to bed, Barnes and Natasha climbed the fence into the back yard, jimmied the doors, and went inside.

It was still and silent and smelt of must and dust and neglect. The furniture was covered in sheets; in the kitchen appliances were stacked in their original boxes, thirty years old at least. When Natasha pulled the cover off the couch in the living room she stared: it wouldn’t have looked out of place in an old-fashioned drawing room, all curved legs and carved headrest above the upholstery.

Upstairs the bedrooms were as empty and impersonal as the living room, the mattresses covered in plastic and the sheets and pillows in sealed bags atop them. They’d left trails of footprints in the thick dust on the floors and stairs. The place looked as if Irina had expected to come back here at any moment over the last thirty years and simply… take up living, as if she’d always belonged here. For god’s sake, there were even paintings, reproductions, on the walls: Pissarro, Monet, Chagall.

For a high-ranking KGB officer, not very… Soviet.

Natasha moved through the house like a rank amateur. She jumped at the shadows of the trees outside on the walls or floor, and the fact that none of the interior doors were closed made her feel watched. If Barnes felt the same he didn’t show it. He was utterly silent, touching her arm to point things out, his eyesight good enough that he didn’t even bother with a flashlight. _You’ll never find him_ , she’d said to Steve, _he’s a ghost_ … he certainly moved like one. But it neither frightened nor perturbed her. She heard his breathing because he wanted her to, and felt the warmth of his body at her back or by her side, and took comfort in the steady silent presence.

At last, when even the attic proved unhelpful, they tackled the basement. Opposite the washing machine and the tumble dryer on one side of the steps there was an empty wooden wine rack against the other wall, and other than that nothing.

“The appliances creep me out a little,” Barnes said in a hoarse whisper, and Natasha nodded.

“Me too,” she said, just as quiet. “I can’t believe this is supposed to be everything.”

“Me either.” He glanced round the narrow space, frowning, as Natasha flicked the flashlight beam over the walls. Nothing behind the empty wine rack…

“What about the washer?”

“Hmm.” Barnes slipped past her and gave it a tug, working it backwards over the slightly uneven floor; Natasha hissed in triumph.

“Trap door.”

“I hate her,” Barnes said, and reached for the dryer too. “I really really hate her.”

“Crowbar?”

“I don’t think…” There was a ring set into the metal of the trap door; Barnes hooked his fingers in it, and Natasha circled around to cover the opening. The hinges squealed, but they moved without much effort, and the only thing that came out was stale, fusty air. The flashlight beam showed bare floor, and a suggestion of filing cabinets. Natasha went down first, landing on her feet silently. It _was_ filing cabinets, a table with a few chairs, a phone – an ancient phone. There was a lightbulb swinging over the table; she followed the line of the cable with the flashlight until she found the light switch.

“Cover your eyes,” she called up to Barnes, closing her own and snapping the switch on. It wasn’t very bright, but it burned her eyes for a second, and she stood and blinked around at the empty room and sighed.

“Still nothing.” Barnes had followed her down. “They must have cleared this place out…”

“Yeah.”

Just as upstairs, the filing cabinets and the drawers were empty, dust over everything. One of the chairs had been toppled over and left there; there was an unpleasantly dark stain on the concrete floor. Natasha scuffed at it with her foot, wondering what poor bastard had died in this cell-like little hole… But if you went around willingly having dealings with Irina Markova, this was what you got. She’d nearly moved on when something caught her eye: something – was there something _under_ the filing cabinet? She crouched down and fit her fingers underneath it, feeling around… yes, a corner of – not paper, something stronger, like a – photograph? Her fingertips scrabbled for a second on the edge before she had a grip and pulled it out. How had it got under there? Maybe flung across the table, and then floated down and slid under the cabinet… maybe their long-dead friend had been holding it, and it had been knocked under here somehow when he’d fallen.

It lay face down, covered in dust. She shook it to dislodge the dust, and the cloud billowed up in the dim light, some of it settling on her dark jeans. _Palais Garnier, 1938_ , was written on the back in cramped, old-fashioned handwriting. Cursive. Suddenly she felt a little sick, seeing that handwriting, as if she recognised it, as if it twanged some string inside her that she hated.

“Romanov?” said Barnes. Then, more softly, “Natalia?”

She turned the photograph over. Faded, yellowed, foxed at the edges, but still sufficiently distinct: her own face smiled up at her, perfectly made-up, gloves and coat and boots and perfect hat and handbag swinging from her right hand, laughing on a black and white Paris street like – like she’d stepped out of a black and white film, as if Humphrey Bogart were about to come round the corner and offer her a cigarette. It was Paris, it _was_ the Palais Garnier in the background. She was shaking. How old did she look, that girl in the photograph who could not be Natasha? Early twenties, she decided. Barnes’ hand at the small of her back steadied her; with the other he took the photo out of her nerveless fingers.

“Well,” he said quietly, checking the back, then staring down at her smiling face again. “I don’t suppose you’d know anything about uncommon family resemblances?”

Natasha made a noise that would have been a laugh if she’d had the breath for it, and when she swayed he put his arm around her shoulders and held her. For a moment she was stiff and awkward, but he didn’t let her go, and she relaxed into him bit by bit, trying to keep herself from shaking.

“Kinda girl I’d’ve been too shy to ask for a date,” he said, a little hesitant. He was trying to make her laugh, to comfort her, but she could hear how unpractised he was at it, how he didn’t quite know what to say or do. Still, it made her smile.

“That’s not what Steve’d say.”

“Ahh, no, he’s an idiot. My Dad was a grocer. This – what you’re wearing – you’re outta my league, my girl.”

“Rich,” Natasha murmured. She couldn’t quite bear to look at the thing.

“I think so, yeah.” He sounded thoughtful.

“God,” she said. “It really is all about me, isn’t it.” She stepped back from him, groaning. “I’m sorry I dragged you into it. I didn’t know –”

“Oh, stop,” he said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but this is the most fun I’ve had in seventy years. Come on, what next? Rostov?”

“No,” Natasha said slowly. “I – no. Not yet…”

+++

The coffins had been loaded with weapons.

“What the actual fuck,” said Barnes.

“I’m going mad,” Natasha said. She threw the shovel away and wiped her filthy hands on her jeans, breathing hard. There was an ache in her back and thighs and her eyes were burning; her clothes were soaked in sweat. “I’m going _mad_.”

“For god’s sake,” said Barnes. “What’s in that box? Ammo?” He wrenched it out of where it was packed tight into the corner of what was supposed to be her mother’s coffin, and hacked at the padlock with the shovel-blade until it broke. “IDs – money.” A fistful of roubles; considerably more American dollars; a few bundles of, in god’s name, German Marks – oh god, East German Marks. Natasha stared at the worthless paper as Barnes dumped it into the grass, feeling sick.

“That dates it,” she said, shocked to hear her voice so hoarse. After a moment she sat down, her legs flung in front of her, staring at the graves.

“The Marks? Yeah.”

“All she would have had to do was change the headstones to make the dates match up,” Natasha said, and then she started laughing. “Oh my god. Oh, this is brilliant. Whose – the IDs –?”

“Yours,” he said, and passed her a couple. “Birthdates are in the Sixties.” American passport; UK, French. She flipped through them, her fingers numb: empty pages, birthplaces all over, oh god what was the point. Natasha dropped them all and flopped backwards onto the earth, staring up at the steel grey sky overhead; the stars were fading, and the cold wind was making her skin prickle as her sweat dried.

“I was born in 1984,” she said, her mind as blank as her voice sounded.

“Are you sure?”

She didn’t answer. There was a line of pale blue on the horizon, a faint flush of yellow. It was going to be a beautiful day…

“ _Romanov_.” Barnes kicked her in the ankles, and she jerked upright, shocked into anger.

“What –”

“Quit it with the self-pity,” he said. “It doesn’t suit you, _lisichka_.” He squatted so their faces were on a level; she dug her filthy hands into the dirt, too stubborn to look away from those pale grey eyes. _Lisichka_. Who the hell did he think he was? But the silly endearment made her warm all over. “Look. This is an emergency stash. The IDs, the money, the weapons – even the house.”

“The house!”

“You saw it,” he said. “Furniture, mattresses, sheets on the damn beds, kitchen appliances. She’d set it up like any moment you could walk back in there and just start living.”

“I noticed. She must have –”

“You,” he said. “ _You_ could walk back in there. Not Irina. You.”

Natasha closed her eyes.

“How do you know she’s after the serum? What makes you so sure? How did you know about it at all, if you didn’t know about Siberia?”

Natasha groaned. Neatly trapped… Why had he waited so long? Maybe he was bored. Maybe he thought she was entertaining, and liked to indulge her. Maybe he hoped for a cure badly enough that he just didn’t care. In the end, it hardly mattered. She faced him squarely and said, “She came to me. In Rio. She offered me money to help her find it. A lot of money. She was sure there were more samples.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, watching the still expressionless face, the way his eyes darted over her, cataloguing her microexpressions, trying to process this new information. “I was her favourite. In the red rooms. I was the best. The most skilled, the most… malleable. She liked that.”

“Malleable,” he said, unreadable.

“The one she found easiest to make into a monster.”

He gave her a look.

“What,” she snapped.

“Everybody breaks, Romanov. We’re only human. Get over yourself.” But his tone wasn’t harsh, and he put a hand on her knee and rubbed her calf comfortingly, crooked little smile on his lips. “Listen, kid. Even if she’s… obsessed?... with you, that doesn’t explain the dates on these. Or the photo we found.”

“I know,” Natasha said. “I know.” She rubbed her hands over her face. “Dammit. Whenever she turns up I feel like that girl again, that trainee… OK. Never mind me for a second. The serum’s real, or at least Irina’s convinced it’s real. Rostov is still a lead. We have to follow that up before she finds us, or it.”

“Agreed,” Barnes said. “Come on. Let’s pack up the weapons and take ‘em back. We can stash ‘em in the basement.”

“You want to make the house our base of operations?”

“Why not? We need one. And if we secure the serum first it might lure her out.”

“You’re poking a bear with a stick.”

He grinned. “Yeah. But she doesn’t know I’m with you – chances are she thinks I died in Siberia.”

“You’re a reckless asshole,” she said. But she couldn’t help herself smiling. Even a reckless plan was better than blundering aimless in the dark, and the thought of luring Irina out and pinning her down to some answers made Natasha almost hopeful.

+++

The train ride to Rostov was interminable. Anxiety and adrenaline were churning up her insides, making her snappish and impatient, until at last Natasha folded her hands in her lap and tried some of the meditation stuff the SHIELD shrinks had taught her years ago, her eyes closed, her body rocking with the swaying of the train. Every now and then her shoulder pressed against Barnes’ – he was reading again – and the solid warmth of him comforted her indescribably.

He had been a saint all day, ever since the cemetery – had let her snap and snarl and pace about without hitting back, and Natasha thought, _he knows what it’s like_. Nobody had been there to badger him into doing anything sensible, to talk him into calm: he’d walked away from the only family he had to try and protect it, and did not seem to resent having to help Natasha as he’d not been helped, or hold her in contempt for being such a mess.

Again that soft protective instinct. She looked at him sideways, watching him as he read, the little expressions that showed his pleasure in the book, the fall of his hair and the movement of his hands. She remembered him in Wakanda then, the grief he’d shown her; suddenly she pictured herself putting her arms around his shoulders, cradling the strong body close and holding him the way he’d held her in the basement of the house, the way she hadn’t quite dared to in that white, impersonal conference room.

Oh, stop. This was no time to be caught up in – in feelings about lost national icons from the Forties; not again. She made herself look away, try to read, stare out the window, but the landscape was not as prepossessing as his face, and she was too keyed up to read. As the train ride dragged on she gave up on the world entirely and slumped against him to try and sleep. He didn’t seem to mind…

He woke her a little before the train arrived. She found she’d tucked herself into a ball on the seat, and her head was pillowed on his folded jacket in his lap.

“Hey.” His arm was across her waist, holding her on the seat. There was something close and tender in his face as he looked down at her. _Safe, I’m safe_ , she thought. Natasha smiled at him, sleepy and uncoordinated – she so rarely got to wake up in his arms. She wanted the photoveil gone, wanted to see his eyes, the laugh lines, the lush mouth, the strong jaw. She reached up to touch his face instead, and he smiled at her.

“We’re nearly there.”

“Yeah. Yeah, course.” She sat up, rubbing at her face, clumsy and stiff, immediately missing his body heat. She pressed close again without thinking, and he put his arm over her shoulders and kissed her temple. Anyone would think they were a couple…

He’d been to Rostov before, apparently. He led her through the station unerringly, found them a place to stay the night: an unremarkable little hotel near the train station. There was a café nearby where they grabbed a fairly decent meal – casting about for some non-committal topic of conversation, she found herself arguing with him about books for two straight hours, laughing, delighted by the way he had such strong opinions about everything. He was quick-tongued, intelligent, and funny, and Natasha liked him more with every word he spoke.

Back at the hotel room, the idea was to make it an early night. Natasha caught herself watching him when he took the photoveil off, watching the way the nondescript features melted into a face she knew and – and – She turned away in a hurry when he turned his head, disconcerted to realise she was blushing. His bruises had healed, and there was a healthier cast to his skin now than in Wakanda or Berlin. Awkwardly she cast about for something innocuous to say.

“I think M.O. the same as in Stalingrad. Stake out the place for a day, then go in after dark if nothing’s moved. We should be able to get – is there a subway? If not, busses.”

“Sure,” Barnes said. He was sitting on the end of the bed now, watching her; she’d wandered over to the window, staring out at the unprepossessing view from a chink in the curtains. His gaze on her back was heavy as a touch, comforting. It was nice, to be seen again … “It’s a routine job, Natalia; chances are she thinks we’re both dead. If she’s not caught up with us by now…”

Natasha glanced at him. “Getting complacent?”

He laughed; she couldn’t help a smile. “Fatalistic,” he said. “We can’t do more than what we’re doing.”

She sighed. “That’s true.” She glanced back out the window again, and after a moment she heard him stand up, his footsteps on the carpet. “Hmm?”

When she turned he was very close to her. Trapped, trapped in the triangle between window and wall and the breadth of his body. Something caught in Natasha’s throat, squeezed her heart. She made herself meet his eyes.

“Why me?” he said quietly. It was the fourth time he’d asked.

“You understand,” she repeated.

He shook his head. “Why me?” His hand, his glinting metal left hand, pulled her top up at her hip, just a few inches. Then he touched her shoulder. “Twice, I…”

“Three times,” she said, and took his wrist in her fingers, moved his hand to her throat. The touch of those body-warm fingers made her shiver.

“You could at least recognise me,” he said softly.

Natasha said, “You know, a little _hey, how’s it going, sorry about the scars_ , that might’ve been nice.”

“What do you know about me that I don’t?”

(Dreams. Just dreams. _Lisichka_. Natalia. Heart’s own. My Widow. My love. Just dreams.)

“Nothing,” she whispered.

“What do you suspect, then?”

What _didn’t_ she suspect? Just dreams. Just dreams. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know. But Irina turns up in Rio wanting the serum, and now, what, that – that photo, the IDs…”

“You’re sure you want to take it? You might not like what you learn.”

“That’s irrelevant. I can’t fumble around in the dark... I have to have the truth, or what’s the point?”

Barnes nodded judiciously. He neither criticised nor questioned her decision. “And where do I come into it?”

His fingers were still at her throat, her hand around his wrist. Where did he come into it? Pain and blood and the sharp spike of fear, of realising she was up against something she couldn’t easily defeat or cajole or control, the pity and the fascination she felt for one of the very few people in the world who was in the exact same position as she… Steve’s blind faith in him, unconditional love for him, and his own determination to do what was right, to prevent himself from being made to murder more innocents.

The ease with which they worked together, the unthinking way he nicknamed her, how much she liked the sound of his voice and the curve of his smile. That unexpected protectiveness. How convinced she’d been, years ago in DC, against all reason, that if she could just get him on his own he would know her and he would stop… and endless, endless dreams. She stepped closer, saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. She had to put her head back to look into his face from this close. For an instant she curled her toes into the carpet. Then she rose up on them.

“Round about here.”

The first few seconds that lovely mouth was as awkward as a surprised teenager’s, but when she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her body all up against his some sense-memory took over, and he backed her into the wall and slanted his mouth over hers just right and kissed her back like he wanted to take possession of her soul. It made her knees tremble, her breath come quick, her pulse thrumming against his fingers, and she closed her eyes and kissed him again and again and again till she was dizzy with lust and touch and body heat, so long missed.

Was Steve the last person she’d hugged, in the church in London? She thought so. Her hands ached to touch his skin, and when they broke apart to strip each other she was impossibly cold until his arms went round her again, and then, oh, then. The bed creaked underneath them, but the sheets were clean and soft and warm. His hands were gentle and his mouth hot and wet, his body strong and solid beside her, above her. Natasha arched up against him, holding him close, her hands pressing into hard muscles, feeling soft skin and uneven scarring. He was so hot all over, even his left arm was warm, and everywhere her skin touched his she was on fire, pleasure clenching her up, running down her spine, making her breathless, clumsy.

Oh god, oh god. He parted her thighs so gently, tugging her left leg up and over his hip, and when he caressed her she went hot all over, gasping, squirming against him, safe in the steady circle of those strong arms. She kissed his mouth, the cleft in his chin, his soft vulnerable throat, and sighed when he shuddered. She clutched at him, her eyes closed and her head falling back, when he sank inside her slowly, and along with the lovely burn of it came a distant, muted thought: _finally my darling, you’re mine, you’re mine_. It wasn’t humanly possible for them to get closer to one another but she needed it all the same. His skin on hers all over, his thick hair between her fingers soft, his stubble scratched her neck, her breasts; her mouth was swollen and her thighs were tense, and – and –

“Sweetheart,” he murmured. “You’re crying.”

“Hah.” She reached up to wipe her face; her fingers were trembling, and he caught her wrist between his fingers and thumb and kissed the tears away instead, his lips very soft on her cheeks, her temples. “So are you,” she said suddenly, and he laughed, broken.

“Been a long time since…”

“Yeah.” Natasha wrapped her legs around his waist, rolling their hips together; he groaned, hiding his wet face in her shoulder. “Me too.” The truth was – she was dizzy and lust-drunk and tired and her mind and memory had been a mess since the day Irina had walked into the ballet studio and called her _Natashenka_ , but the truth was, right now, she didn’t consciously remember there ever having been anyone else. She squeezed her eyes shut, gripped him tight.

“Yeah.” He shuddered, the broad shoulders heaving. Then he kissed her collar-bone, and she thought he was smiling. “Tell me how you like it.”

“Oh!” she said. How _did_ she like it? What a question. “On your back?”

“Yeah. Come here.” He rolled them over, and she straddled his hips, laughing suddenly, still choked up, and stroked her hair out of her face when she leaned back down to kiss him again, sighing as his hands ran down her bare back, and slowly, slowly, as she knelt up just right and they began to move together, the world blurred away, and this was all that was left: his eyes, and his touch, and the heat between their bodies, a comfort and a promise.

+++

She woke tangled up in him, his leg flung over her thighs, her face pressed against his chest; she wasn’t sure they’d moved since falling asleep. Natasha shifted back to look at him, reaching up to push her hair back, watching the shadows the dim light cast across his face. He’d been dozing, and when he felt her move his eyes opened, lazy, pale, knowing eyes. A shiver ran down her spine.

“Morning,” he murmured.

“Good morning.” Was her tone stilted? Last night had been so easy. Now she didn’t know what to do, what to say. She’d got what she wanted – needed – from him: common sense and self-preservation suggested very strongly that she climb out of bed, say something vaguely friendly and entirely dismissive, before he did it to her. She felt stiff and awkward and ungainly in his arms, as if any move she made would make him uncomfortable. But if she stood up she’d be standing there naked, with nothing – Natasha drew a breath, half a dozen lines on the tip of her tongue – _better get moving; last night was fun but don’t think it means anything; you mind if I have the shower first_ – each one worse than the one that came before. (Asleep in his arms, she hadn’t dreamed at all.)

Bucky beat her to it anyway, with a funny sigh and a twist of his mouth.

“Thank you,” he said.

That threw her off. “Huh?”

“For last night,” he said. “For – it’s been so long, and –” He curled his left hand into a loose fist, glancing away. When was the last time anyone had touched him gently? “Anyway, thank you.” Soft quick breath, almost pained. She realised then that if she let him he would walk away now and not look back, thinking she didn’t – He’d barely moved an inch away from her before she felt… bereft.

Natasha closed her hands on him, breathless. Something anxious was tying her insides in knots. She wasn’t sure of much, but that tiny movement had sufficed to show her she was sure she wanted him. “I didn’t get the impression that was the kind of guy you were, Sergeant Barnes.” She made her voice light, amused, and felt triumphant when some of the tension went out of him.

“You know what I am,” he said. “I don’t expect…” He gestured, vaguely, not sure himself what he was afraid of. He really did, he thought she would turn him away. She was stung and sad and angry all at once.

“You know what _I_ am,” Natasha said. Two lost monsters in a bed together. Hah.

But Bucky smiled, the skin around his eyes folding into stupidly attractive laugh-lines. “Yeah. Kind. And gentle, and a little unsure of herself, and very determined to do the right thing.”

“Oh!” Natasha’s turn to look away. He touched her chin, her jaw, gently turned her head back to look at him.

“If – if you want –” He was blushing, adorably, and his fingers trembled, and she could see his fear in the set line of his wide, enticing mouth. But he met her gaze squarely.

“If _you_ want,” she said, grinning a bit. Funny that his uncertainty made her more sure of herself. How brave he was, to think that and then suggest… Impossible not to match that offer with one of her own. She thought she heard his breathing hitch. His eyes widened, and for a moment he looked ten years younger with hope and delight.

He grinned back. “Hang around here a little longer and see what happens?”

“Hmm.” Natasha ran her hands down his chest, light-headed with something very like joy. “I’ve got a prediction or two.”

“We’ve got two hours till they stop doing breakfast.”

“Excellent.”

It really was. She couldn’t get enough of him: bare skin and body heat and how good it was when he made her laugh… And she loved to make him laugh, too, to watch that tired, withdrawn mask crack and his face light up. It took a heroic effort on her part to force herself out of bed at last, into the shower, to get dressed and ready to go instead of pulling the sheets over both their heads and putting her hands on him _again_. But willpower and superior self-control got them downstairs just about in time for breakfast.

“If there’s nothing there…” she said thoughtfully as they ate.

“Hmm,” Bucky said. “Do something really stupid to draw her out?”

“Sounds like a plan of Steve’s.” Natasha rolled her eyes at him. It was the second time he’d suggested something like it, as if he were growing frustrated, chafing to do something concrete. He and Steve were so alike: clever and brave, determined to do good with what they were – determined to trust beyond reason. But so different, too. Bucky was patient where Steve was wary, amused or grateful or indulgent where Steve was proud, accepting of things Steve pushed back against. If the serum worked, if it healed his mind and wiped the triggers out… She was looking forwards to seeing what kind of man he was without all this self-imposed restraint.

“Where did you think he gets it from?” Bucky grinned a bit.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The history books make you sound like the sensible one. Straight A student, loving and dutiful older brother.” Too late she kicked herself for that. Did he remember his siblings? Sisters. It had said three sisters.

“Yeah,” he said. “Bucky Barnes, nicest boy in the neighbourhood, never put a foot wrong.” His mouth was twisted a little bitterly.

Ahh. “Except when you were out with Steve.” That made sense.

“Except when I was out with Steve.” He poured them both another cup of coffee from the thermos on the table, smiling faintly. “What’s the dumbest thing you ever did?”

“Joined a superhero team,” she said instantly. “You? The Army?”

“Drafted,” he said.

Well that made her feel like an idiot. She couldn’t seem to keep a grip on her tongue when she was around him; every question threw up pitfalls that made her feel a fool, and –

His eyes were glinting, and she’d learned to read the way he pursed his lips and licked them as a sign of suppressed amusement.

Natasha sighed, and Bucky laughed at her.

“Stop flinching, _vdova_.”

“I wish you’d settle on a nickname and stick to it,” she lied idly.

“Sorry.”

“Liar.” She smiled at him suddenly. He reached out and covered her hand with his where it lay on the table top, his thumb rubbing over her skin.

“I don’t mind, you know. Talking about it.”

“I used to hate it,” she explained. “I wanted a blank slate, a way to start fresh and not hurt when people who didn’t know me asked… when I’d moved to the States, or where in Russia my parents were from. It took a long time for that to stop hurting.” A constant, low-level reminder that she wasn’t normal, and never would be.

“I understand,” he said. “But in my case, if talking about Becca and my Mam and Dad makes me feel like someone’s hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat, it means I’ve not forgotten them.”

Natasha turned her hand under his and squeezed it tight.

+++

The warehouse was deserted. Not even a mouse, as the song said, stirred in the parking lot all the day they watched the place, and no one came near. Natasha’s contacts were silent, and as they waited the day grew grim and grey with gathering clouds. For the first time Bucky was less than patient; as the day darkened so did his mood, the clench of his jaw and the little shifts of his body giving him away as loud as any verbal outburst of temper.

At last, shortly after sundown, both his and her reserves of patience were thoroughly depleted. Natasha was wound tight as wire, struggling to control her breathing as they broke in through the heavy doors; the rusted chain around the handles clattered and fell, and she caught it before it clattered loudly on the broken tarmac. Bucky took point, again not needing a flashlight. Natasha followed him silent and slow, anxiety making her stomach swoop and squirm; she wondered if she might yet throw up. Broken glass crunched under their feet here and there. The great ground floor of the warehouse was empty, a few rusted conveyor belts and industrial machines piled near the doors, as if someone had decided to clear the place out and then abandoned the project before they were finished. The glass in the windows high above their heads was filthy, panes missing here and there, so that inside was as chilly as out. Softly as they moved, they couldn’t keep the occasional footfall from echoing, emphasising the size of the place, its lonely, abandoned state.

The thought flashed across Natasha’s mind that she and Bucky were fairly lonely and abandoned too, in this moment. She shook it off angrily. T’Challa could find them whenever he wanted, and Steve and Clint would come at a moment’s notice.

That thought wasn’t welcome either. She knew perfectly well that she’d been sulking all these months like a child who thought her older brothers had treated her badly, and half the reason it had been so much fun was because she also knew perfectly well that all she had to do was call them to make it right. Well, they hadn’t called her. Well, she’d made sure they wouldn’t know where to look for her. Mailing the kids’ presents from Novosibirsk, for god’s sake. Wherever this talent for theatrics came from it outstripped even Tony’s by a mile…

Upstairs the offices were empty, stripped even of empty filing cabinets, no furniture left. Downstairs there was a small warren of corridors and locker rooms, disused lavatories with cracking tiles on the walls and floors, and, somewhere up ahead, a dull green light spilling through an open door.

Natasha bit her lip. If there was another missile strike at the end of this she was going to be _seriously_ pissed off.

“Computers,” Bucky said quietly, sliding the safety on his gun back on. He was breathing quick, nervousness at a fever pitch. “I don’t think anybody’s following us.” He licked his lips. Joining him in the doorway, Natasha saw a massive old computer desk perpendicular to the left-hand wall, a floor thick with dust, an installation on the left wall like a small screen that was emitting that dull green glow. “It’s a retinal scan reader. A really old one.”

Natasha put her hand on his arm. The dust and bad air was getting to her; she wanted to cough, wanted a sip of water, wanted a cigarette, wanted to leave this place and never look back, to leave its secrets in the USSR and forget her parents’ empty coffins, the Stalingrad house that was so wrong and so familiar, the sight of Irina’s smile in the ballet studio in Rio, a smile soft and warm and almost proud.

She holstered her gun and walked across the floor to the scanner. Green light flared up; for an instant she was blinded, and could only hear a sudden angry beep and a hiss and scrape of long-disused mechanics.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Bucky said.

Natasha turned. The floor was moving back underneath the right-hand wall; it stuttered and scraped here and there, but the mechanism didn’t jam. Dim lights set against the walls on either side of the tunnel at the foot of the staircase at their feet flickered through a veil of cobwebs; the air that wafted up at them was stale and clammy-cold. “This is like a fucked-up Boy Scout scavenger hunt.”

The computer screen lit up. Natasha turned to it, heart in her throat. But no malicious AIs here. Natalia Alianovna Romanova, the screen said. Black Widow. The KGB ID number beneath the flashing green letters that spelled out _access granted_ was completely different to the one she knew by heart. “Were you ever a Boy Scout?”

“God, no,” said Bucky. He sighed. “I guess this helps explain why she tracked you down in Rio.”

“Does it? Why isn’t she here?” The ancient computer, after a few seconds’ recalcitrance, gave her a list of other authorised personnel: Irina Nikolaevna Markova. Tatiana Petrovna Kirilova. Asset 29456733. Natasha put a hand to the wall to steady herself.

“Did they give you an ID number?”

“Hydra? Yeah. 2945 –” Bucky stopped. “You mean –”

Just dreams. Apparently not. Memories? It seemed certain they had known each other, at the very least. Well now. Natasha rubbed a hand over her face. “I don’t recognise the fourth name.”

He came over to her, put his hand at the small of her back, frowned at the screen. “Me either.”

“What’s Irina _doing_? She doesn’t need me to retrieve the serum for her. She didn’t need me to find it. Masha’s intel wasn’t buried that deep.”

Bucky looked grim. “That’s a point we’ll have to take up with her,” he said. “She’s not waiting for us outside the warehouse. That would make no sense. I can’t imagine that she’ll turn up in Stalingrad…”

“Unless they’re watching for her specifically, so she sends us in…”

“It looks like we were always in on this, whatever it is.” He bit his lip. “Nothing’s changed. We need that serum.”

“If this is a set up – that is, obviously it’s a set up. But if it’s not the real serum –”

“There’s only one way to be sure.”

“Bucky,” Natasha said, catching his elbow as he made for the stairs. “Bucky, you –”

He swung back to her quick and graceful as a cat; she gasped when instead of arguing he cupped her nape in his left hand and kissed her, fierce.

“I can’t fumble around in the dark forever,” he said. Here was the façade shattered: rough-voiced and desperate and raw, fraying at the edges with the weight of this the same way she was. “I can’t put myself back in that coffin, not after – and I don’t see any other way to make myself safe.”

Natasha grabbed him, angry. “You are not a, a nuclear warhead that needs to be neutralised. You’re a person, not a thing, and I won’t watch you die in agony because you’re _impatient_ , darling, I _won’t_.”

“As long as this bullshit is still in my head I might as well be an axe in someone’s hand. You’re looking for memories, my girl, but all I want’s an open door.” His face was set and hard, but when he kissed her again she knew how much she’d made herself mean to him, these past days.

She kissed him back, her hands clenched in his jacket. “All right,” she whispered. “All right. The house…”

“It’s defensible, at least,” Bucky pointed out.

“It is, more or less.” Natasha sighed. “It scares me that this is probably what she wants from us.”

“I don’t like it either, sweetheart. I don’t.” Another kiss, short and sweet. “But what’re our other choices? Walk away? Retrieve the serum and then not chance it? There’s two risks here – the triggers and the serum – and one cancels the other out. That’s not coincidence. She’s set us up for something, and the only way out is through.”

“I wish you were wrong.” She rubbed her hands over his sides, let her head drop to his chest. “I so wish you were wrong.”

“So do I.” He put his arms around her, held her tight.

“All right.” Natasha drew a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”

 

 

**II.**

It was dawn when she woke – woke fully, the nightmares over, the pain faded. For long moments she lay and breathed air that tasted fresher and newer and more lovely than any air she’d ever tasted; then, as the seconds passed, she remembered where she was, and why…

The windows were open, the breeze stirring her hair. The dustsheet lay in a crumpled bundle on the floor at the foot of the bed, and her footprints were plain in the dust. They would have to get a vacuum, she supposed. And food, real food. Clothes; toiletries. She was dizzy, unsteady on her legs, and clung to the doorframe leading to the ensuite bathroom desperately.

The husband’s bedroom, the wife’s boudoir, the shared bathroom. It was perfect. Maman had probably thought she was being funny.

A green-eyed girl with dull brown hair and a tired, haggard face looked at her out of the mirror. She had a funny look, this girl, something sly and secretive and knowing, something that mocked you for not holding all the secrets she knew.

“Natasha Romanov,” Natalia Markova croaked. “Natalia Alianovna Romanova.” She heaved a long hoarse sigh. “I’m sorry I wasn’t better to you, little one.” The child had only ever wanted a place to belong – a home…

Natalia had a home. It had been rebuilt, in perfect, excruciating detail, right down to the Queen Anne chairs and the Louis Quinze dressers, hundreds of miles away from Paris, either as a mockery or as an… an attempt at insurance. If all else failed, a perfect replica of something so deeply intertwined into your being as the place in which you’d lived the first ten years of your life might help to break a wipe or ten.

Typical Maman: always doing three things at once, and each had layers upon layers of motivations you could kill yourself trying to understand. Natalia didn’t bother. She was too exhausted to be angry anyway. She used the toilet, washed her hands; then she flung the shower door back and stripped and stepped under the spray, listening to the pipes clank and the water clatter on the shower stall floor and feeling the muscles in her back and shoulders relax under the hot water. She scrubbed the sweat away, the dirt of travelling, and washed her hair until the water swirled an ugly brown with the temporary dye.

Dry and dressed once more, she still didn’t look like herself: her hair was too short, her face too changed, her clothes too ridiculous. Romanov had not slouched, but she had not had the carriage of a woman who had been wearing corsets and stays since early adolescence either. Natalia shook her head at herself. And then, on impulse… though Natalia had not danced in even longer than Romanov had thought, it came easily to her: chin up, shoulders straight, slow movements from one position to the next; easy, too easy. She shouldn’t have these reflexes still, this much control over her body. The serum? She didn’t know. She didn’t _want_ to know. She wanted to dance, and remember for a little while a routine that had once been part of her very soul.

Until the war. Until the siege, until Papa had been killed, and Nikolai had died in her arms in some distant anonymous field she would never see again, and little Rose was gone before she was even born. Natalia sat on the end of the bed, staring at nothing, remembering the weight of her daughter’s body in her arms, the wrinkled eyelids, the still lips, the dusting of hair, the tiny fingers, impossibly small. She had exactly zero illusions about what – who – had killed Rose. She was too old to believe that she had not been given the enhancements until after the war… that was typical Maman, too. She’d probably tipped the stuff into Natalia’s coffee one morning as if it were sugar. Well. That was a long time ago however you looked at it. Poor Nikolai. They’d been such children, the both of them… but she had loved him so, with all the fierce passion of a girl who’d never had time to be in love before, and who now expected to die at any moment.

She did seem to have a habit of falling in love in the most impossible situations, didn’t she. Remembering Rostov made her smile: how much they had liked each other, and how easy it had been to trust him, in spite of everything that had gone before, bits and pieces of their true selves flickering through the wipes and the trauma and the false memories. Just as in Moscow, all those years ago… the grey dull months in the training facility, teaching girls to fight and kill, interspersed with missions, and the sight of his smile when they could snatch a few minutes alone, a few hours to make love.

They were pathetically, ridiculously, beautifully consistent.

At last she could go to him, open the door to his bedroom and walk across the floor. He was still twisting in the fever, the sheets wet with sweat. Poor darling; she only hoped he wasn’t dreaming, that it wasn’t painful. He had, what, a foot of height and about a hundred pounds of muscle on her? The serum was taking longer to burn through him, apparently. And at the end there was still the final hurdle: _Good morning, Soldier. Ready to comply_. Natalia brushed his sweaty hair off his forehead gently, her fingers lingering on his beloved face. If it didn’t work… It had to work.

But if it didn’t, they would find another way. She bent over him and kissed his forehead gently.

“Hang in there, dearest,” she whispered. “Fight for it… We’ve not come this far just to lose each other at the last test. Come back to me.”

+++

Six hours later she’d unpacked all the appliances, flung open all the windows and thrown out the dust sheets, vacuumed every room in the place but his, and ordered delivery of a fridgeful of food and drink off the internet. It made her feel awfully virtuous – like whatwashername – Betty Crocker. It stopped her worrying, too: stopped her thinking, stopped her feeling. All Natasha Romanov’s messy emotions seemed trapped behind a milky glass wall, while Natalia’s own… Natalia’s own were not in much better order. But at least she only had two things to worry about: Maman, and her Soldier. Everything else she loved was dead, she thought wryly. She scrubbed and dusted and ate bread and butter and jam and drank tea in the spotless kitchen, half expecting Grand-mère’s voice in the drawing room, Babette’s step in the hall. The house was so big it made her feel small and lonely. By evening she was sitting in the living room trying to read, pretending she didn’t mishear every hint of noise as the sound of him coming downstairs –

He was coming downstairs. Natalia forced herself to stay still. Her heartbeat was thundering in her own ears, and her mouth was dry. She looked up when he came into the living room, his footsteps unsteady: pale and haggard as she’d been earlier, and in need of a shower, but there was a calm in his face and a light in his eyes. His body language was controlled, but she felt his eyes on her like a touch.

“Evening.” He was a little hoarse. She smiled at him.  

“Hi.”

Silently he held out a piece of paper to her; in the other hand he had a pencil. She raised herself off the couch a ways to take it, and he promptly stepped away – distance – just in case.

For a moment she turned the paper over in her fingers, her mouth dry. He didn’t say anything – he knew she’d do it – knew she was capable of whatever needed doing. Natalia licked her lips and breathed deep. She’d never read the words before. It made her nauseous. She didn’t know how she kept it out of her voice. She would probably spend the rest of her life searching for ways to avoid saying “seventeen” ever again.

Breathe. Now. Now.

Natalia looked up. “Good morning, Soldier.”

Bucky Barnes flicked the pencil at her head, grinning.

“Oh!” She flung her hand up to ward it off, cackling, giddy with relief and joy. The paper floated away, unimportant, and she couldn’t take her eyes off his face; she was breathless with nervousness again, her stomach squirming, for a very different reason than before. “Well. I guess I can’t get you to do the cooking.” That was inane. _Say something, love – a joke, a hint, anything. Come back to me…_

“Course you can,” he said. “I like to cook, I’ll have you know.”

“What a catch you are,” she said, smiling a little. Maybe he just didn’t want… Not that she’d blame him. Hell of a reminder to wake up to every morning. She blinked hard, forced herself to stillness, waiting. 

“Mmm,” he said. Suddenly she thought, _but his whole posture’s changed_. Chin up, the hunch gone… And his movements were different too: when he came over to her now that lovely swagger was back. Her breath caught in her throat. It wasn’t quite rakish, the way he was smiling at her, but it could be. “There _was_ this one girl.”

Natalia shivered. “Everything?” she said softly.

Her Soldier held out his hand to her, still smiling that faint, ever so slightly arrogant smile. “Everything,” he said. “My Natalia.”

She took his hand, and he pulled her up and into his arms.

+++

“Hey,” she said, lazy, a little breathless.

His arm was around her shoulders, the fingers of his left hand laced with hers by her head; she ran her free hand over his back caressingly, their noses rubbing together as he tilted his head to kiss her again.

“Hi.”

“Been a while.”

“Three whole days.”

She laughed helplessly, arching up into him; he groaned softly, his eyelids fluttering, and moved against her, making her shudder and gasp and clutch at him. God, he felt good: the touch of his skin, his body heat, the lovely stretch of him inside her. His hot breath warmed her face, his body pinned her deliciously, surrounded her, made her safe.

“Nice to have you back,” she said.

“Nice to have _you_ back.” He was smiling, biting his lower lip; that was a task she preferred to undertake herself, and applied herself to it until his mouth was satisfyingly reddened and swollen, and they were both breathing hard, moving together perfectly. No crying this time. But he sighed into her ear, his body bowing over hers, and murmured, “Don’t let me go...”

“Never,” she whispered back. “Never again.” And then, feeling mischievous, “Hang around here a little longer and see what happens.”

He started laughing, and she kissed him again, triumphant. This wasn’t lovemaking: this was a victory march for a hard-won battle, every second of it fought for, and – maybe there was going to be crying after all. She hid her face in his shoulder and wrapped herself yet more tightly around him, and he kissed the line of her neck and the shell of her ear, murmuring promises he would never be made to break again.

+++

Later, nestled safe in the curve of his arm, her Soldier’s roughened metal fingertips drawing slow circles over her skin, Natalia said, “Can I tell you something?”

He kissed her hair. “Anything.”

That made her smile. She snuggled closer against the heat of him, her skin buzzing deliciously with the touch of his. If poor Natasha had thought she was touch-starved, well. Every second Natalia didn’t have her hands on him was agony, and his heartbeat under her ear again was loveliest thing she’d ever heard. He tugged the tangled sheets up a little to shield her from the breeze through the open window. The dim moonlight made his left arm gleam dully – familiar and much-missed and comforting.

“I’m a ballerina. In real life, I mean. With the Bolshoi.”

The Soldier whistled, low and admiring. Then he said, “I’m an accountant.”

Natalia snorted. “You – really?”

“Yep.”

“That’s amazing.” She laughed helplessly, ran her hand down his warm bare chest. “James Buchanan Barnes, war hero, national icon, accountant.”

“I’ve waited tables too. Worked in my Dad’s shop…”

“A grocery shop.” She remembered him saying.

“That’s right.”

“My grandmother was French. My mother was visiting her when I was born… the Revolution – she left me with Grand-mère for most of my childhood. When I was ten she fetched me to Stalingrad.”

“That can’t have been easy.”

“No. But I was only ten, and I managed. I even believed in it – the USSR – for a long time… I saw what she wanted me to see, and I thought we were doing something good; building a better world.”

He was silent a moment. Then he said, “You –”

“Volunteered. Yes.” Best that he know that at once, best that he was aware no one had strapped her screaming to a lab table, or yanked her back from the brink of death against her will and forced her into that chair… she’d walked into the KGB with her head held high and her eyes clear. It had only been later, in the Fifties, after the transfer to Department X and the red rooms, that she’d begun to understand what she’d signed her life away to.

If he hated her for that –

He pulled her close and kissed her forehead. “Oh love, I’m sorry.”

Some awful tension in her chest unravelled. Natalia breathed out, slowly, her face hidden against his shoulder, and now, after that, the worst of it was easy.

“Irina’s my mother,” she said.

This time the silence was a lot longer. “Irina gave the order for Howard’s death,” he said. “I don’t know – I thought it was Lukin’s operation. But I remember her standing there and saying…”

“God!” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Everything’s a goddamn ordeal in this family.”

He burst into startled laughter, and she grinned to herself.

“Yeah. Yeah it is. Sweetheart…”

“Shh.” Natalia pressed her fingers to his lips. “Don’t worry about it now. Nothing’s changed. We still have to stop her.”

“Who do you know who’d lend us a wood chipper?” he said, and when she went off into gales of laughter he pulled her close and kissed her again, and she tangled her hands in his hair, leaning over him. No more bad memories tonight. They had hours yet… their nights had always been each other’s. Tomorrow there would be Irina, and the last samples of the serum, and the mess their lives always were, but this was now, and they had earned every sweet dizzy ecstatic second of it.

+++

Sunlight woke him, pouring through the window and making the whole room glow, or so it felt. He cursed and flung an arm over his eyes; it was way too early – shit, it was too _late_. The shop, Dad would – dizzy and disoriented, he stared round the unfamiliar room, the girl in his arms –

Dad was dead. Seventy years too late. He’d woken the girl; she leaned up on her elbows, her red hair a tousled mess, and blinked at him blearily.

“Soldier?”

“I –” he said blankly. “We –”

“Stalingrad,” she said. “We’re in Stalingrad,” and then, softly, she said, “James – Bucky,” and it all fell into place.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, and fell back into the pillows, breathing hard. “Hell. I’m sorry, darling, I didn’t mean to wake you up.” He sighed out slowly, making himself relax. Breathe in, Barnes; breathe out. You’re safe here. Safe. Safe. Mind fully restored and triggers gone and Natalia smiling and naked in his bed: life, in theory, was looking up, he thought wryly, and smiled at her at last.

“I shouldn’t have called you that.” She kissed him, apologetic.

“It’s OK.” He laughed a little. “I’ve always been a soldier.”

“A waiter and an accountant and a grocer.” She tapped a fingertip against his nose. He turned his head and leaned up to kiss her, loving the soft lush mouth against his own, her hair tickling his bare chest, the warmth of her body, the touch of her smooth soft skin. Sweet at first and then coaxing, hot, wanting… It was so indescribably good to be with someone again, to have a warm and gentle touch on his skin, to kiss and caress and pleasure each other. Bucky couldn’t quite believe that it had been her, in Rostov, that they had found their way back to each other, chosen one another, all over again, after everything that had come between them, without even knowing... No, he could believe it. Of course he could. Who the hell else would he ever have fallen for, but her?

“Natalia,” he murmured. “My Natalia.” She was laughing quietly, squirming against him; he ran his hand down her back and bit gently on her lower lip. “My god I missed you. I didn’t even know it.”

“James Buchanan Barnes.” She rubbed her nose against his, still smiling. “I love it that I know your name now.”

“I kinda do too.”

“It’s a nice name.”

“Thanks! I like Natalia. It’s gorgeous.”

“Natalia Petrovna Markova,” she said quietly.

“Mmm.” He wrapped his arms around her back; she was lying atop him now, her hair falling around their faces. “Natasha?”

She shrugged, glancing away and pushing her hair behind her ear; it was a strangely girlish gesture, almost shy. “I miss being Natalia.”

Bucky kissed her again. “OK then.”

“Why haven’t you ever used James?” she asked curiously.

“I really hated being Jimmy,” he said. “Everybody was a Jimmy. I don’t even remember where Bucky came from… but it felt like mine.”

“That’s not James, though.”

“When you’re short and scrawny and seven and half Irish, it definitely is. Later on I guess it would have been OK, but by then I was fine with Bucky.”

“I think it’s kind of awful,” Natalia said solemnly.

“Thank you very much!” But it made him laugh, loud and helpless and uninhibited. It was sweet to be teased again, to have someone close who liked him well enough to needle him, make him laugh... She kissed him, smiling, and for long sweet minutes they lay in the sunshine and made out, hands all over each other… so good to touch her, to be touched, smooth skin and body heat and tenderness, softness and affection, pleasure climbing up to ecstasy. Bucky would never be used to this. He would never take it for granted. At last, tense and breathless with lust, he toppled her into the pillows, rolling them over and trapping her to kiss her lovely mouth; then her chin, the soft vulnerable throat, the hollow beneath it, her sternum. “See if I can make you scream it,” he said wickedly, and was delighted when Natalia _giggled_.

“Oh, that’s a good plan,” she said, all sweet and breathless. “I like it.”

She called him James on purpose. He was never going to be able to hear it again without getting turned on.

+++

They cooked breakfast together, showered and dressed without talking about anything more important than one another: their childhoods, growing up, the war. There was so much to discover about each other that was new and bright and lovely, that had nothing to do with Department X, the assets they had trained together, the missions they’d been sent on…this morning was for the children they’d been: the laughing young ballerina on the Paris street in Maman’s old photograph, the charming boy with a head for numbers and a solidly ordinary home.

Finally, as they were cleaning up the kitchen, he said, “D’you have access to your accounts?”

“I do,” Natalia said.

“May I take out a loan?”

She leaned against the counter, laughing. “How d’you propose to pay it off?”

He looked up at her; grey eyes narrowed in amusement, and gave her a once-over that made her a little shivery, even after they’d spent all night and half the day in one another’s arms.

“Any way the lady desires,” he said lazily.

Natalia grinned. “And what do you propose to use it for?”

Bucky gestured at himself with the dishtowel. “Sick of dressing like I’ve been riding the rails since 1928, to be honest,” he said. “Besides, I think it’s time we changed our M.O.”

She put her hands on her hips. “How so?”

“Look at us,” he said. “We’ve been hiding… we both cut and run and went underground, and they still found us. It wasn’t even _difficult_. The triggers are gone. I’m myself again the way I haven’t been for decades, and so are you… I wasn’t joking in Rostov. About finding a way to draw her out. She’s got us where she wants us, now. We can’t keep dodging this fight.”

“You’re talking like Steve again.” It was the first time either of them had mentioned him since they’d taken the serum, and suddenly Natalia remembered that Natasha Romanov had had friends – people she’d cared for, felt a debt to, wished well, wanted safe. She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of _her_ ,” he said.

Natalia drew a surprised breath. Then she said, “I’ve always been afraid of her.”

For a few seconds he didn’t say anything. Then he said, “Tasha, whose house is this? Whose house is it really?”

She stared at him. He raised an eyebrow at her, and she smiled, a bitter little quirk of her mouth. “I’m not used to being known,” she said. Then, sighing, she admitted it. “It’s mine. It’s an exact replica of my grandmother’s house, from when I was a child. She left it to me when she died in 1937. And – I don’t know for sure, the city’s so different, but I think it’s built on the site of the house that I lived in with my parents after they fetched me to the USSR.”

“The weapons and the money were for you. She _wanted_ both of us to have access to the serum.”

“She implanted me with a whole life of false memories,” Natalia said, “cut me loose from the red rooms, and left enough of a paper trail that I’d be able to find the stash and this place, and she set it up in such a way as to give the best possible chance of the wipe being broken.”

“I agree,” Bucky said. “She’s a nutjob, but she wants you safe.”

Natalia looked away, looking at the wainscoting, the fading wallpaper… How long had this house been here? The stash was from the Eighties, that seemed clear. But there the certainties stopped, and didn’t start again until she’d come to SHIELD…

“Yes. The bombing in Rio was never meant to kill me.” Her voice sounded hollow.

“You turned her away, but she needed you out of there, she needed you on the move. Before someone else found you?” Bucky’s voice was gentle, but he wasn’t letting her hide, not for an instant. Suddenly she thought, _I’m glad_ , and looked back and smiled at him. It was probably a little watery.

“She knew where the serum was – let’s face it, she hid it herself. _She_ knows everything. So the question is, who doesn’t?”

“Lukin? If he’s still alive, my money’s on Lukin.”

“Yes. They hate each other.”

“And there was obviously some fight about it when – before –” He drew a sharp breath. “Before I killed Howard.”

“Before they made you kill Howard,” Natalia said quietly.

He gave her a look.

“I’m not saying don’t feel guilty,” she said. “I’m saying know what you’re feeling guilty for.”

“Your special talent?” he said, grinning a bit.

She rolled her eyes at him. Bucky wrapped his left hand around the nape of her neck and kissed her forehead gently.

“The question is, are we safe here,” he said.

Natalia slid her arms around his waist. “From Irina? Yes. I think so.”

“So we can take a couple of days,” he said. “Regroup, figure ourselves out.”

She looked up at him. “Buy new clothes?”

“I hate denims,” he said solemnly. “I hate jeans, I hate them, I need a pair of slacks, I need a decent suit,” and hugged her tight when she buried her face in his chest, laughing helplessly. “Come on. Let’s get out of here and at least see something different before we both go stir-crazy.”

“Yes. You’re right, yes. Let’s go out.”

+++

The weapons from the fake graves were stored in the basement, but Natalia wrapped the last three vials of the serum in tissues and carried them with her. She felt their weight in her coat pocket with every step. They walked into the city centre and were swept away by the crowds, were seen and spoken to, watched adolescents congregating on corners, young mothers manoeuvring their pushchairs around the shops, men and women in suits grabbing snacks and vanishing back into their office buildings…she slid her arm through Bucky’s, leaning on him, lost in it. Briefly she had a funny double vision: the cars were all wrong, the clothes were ridiculous, the people –

The people were the same, of course. People never really changed. Natalia smiled at the thought, and suddenly she loved it – every second of it – could have turned cartwheels down the pavement for happiness. She hugged Bucky’s arm, swallowing back a laugh, and he laced their fingers together and drew her hand up to his mouth to kiss her knuckles.

He was quiet, just as before, but the change in his body language remained – more openly confident, less… controlled. There was more than one way to pass unseen: either you made yourself look like you belonged nowhere, or you made yourself look like you belonged everywhere. His right mind entirely restored, and confident that no one had the power to change that anymore, Bucky Barnes firmly favoured the latter option. Natalia watched him pick suits and boots with a critical eye, quality but not too expensive, collecting button-down shirts with an air of relief, smiling as he built up their cover from scratch: it was their honeymoon, his wife had lived here as a child, he was glad to be shown around this city that she’d loved – it wasn’t his first time in Russia, no, he’d lived in Moscow as a student…

He was enjoying the hell out of it. Natalia thought it was sweet, and charming, and a little sad. She could picture him working for the SSR after the war and actually liking this job, building these skills because he wanted them.

Time to change their M.O. Was it? Natasha Romanov had cut and run: helpless to fix what Stark and Rogers had broken between them for the sake of their egos, she’d changed her face and gone dark as if her very life were a mission gone sideways. Yet Maman had found her. How? Easy. Maman knew how Natasha’s mind worked, knew what her instincts were. Maman had _made_ those instincts, beaten and programmed them into her. Maman had never much approved of Natalia’s own choices: ballet was a waste of her talents, Nikolai was not good enough, Rose… how she must have gloated when Rose had been stillborn. No excuses left: no more reason for Natalia to walk away.

Maman had manipulated her into walking into the red rooms, and then she’d strapped her to a lab table and cut out all the parts of Natalia’s personality that she’d disliked and replaced them with someone she’d approved of – someone who mirrored her in every important aspect. Natasha Romanov had been more Irina Markova’s daughter than Natalia ever had.

Natasha Romanov was dead. Natalia Markova had been given her life back. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of her. Oh how he knew her. Natasha had been desperately afraid of Madame B. Natalia had never been afraid of Maman.

Irina had resented that, too.

They stopped for food, eating mostly in silence, Bucky smiling at her whenever she caught his eye, a soft, reassuring look. When the bill came Natalia finished her red wine in a single swallow and put the glass down: the sound of it on the wooden table top was comforting, brisk, decisive.

“Come on, Sergeant,” she said. “My turn now.”

He raised an eyebrow at her, and she grinned.

+++

She’d never been shopping with a – a boyfriend? – before. Various TV shows had implied rather strongly that they would hate it and would have no opinions on her clothes at all, but Bucky had an opinion on everything, and an eye for colour and cut: it turned out his sister Emily had worked for a dressmaker.

“Couldn’t take her anywhere,” he said. “She’d sit around and criticise every single outfit on every single girl who passed us. Later on she designed clothes… even went to Paris. I was real proud when I read that.”

“Of course.” The photoveils changed their features, but the pained little smile was intimately familiar, and she reached up and ran her fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and kissed her hand, eyes bright.

Change of M.O. Natasha Romanov had favoured sturdy boots and leather jackets that had been both plain enough to let her blend into a crowd and easy to move in; over the years it had become a kind of uniform. Natalia missed nylons, dresses, gloves and hats, even her furs; soft, flattering, familiar things. What had happened to her final pair of ballet shoes, last worn some time in the autumn of ’39? She didn’t remember. Lost in some bombing or other, probably.  

_Out of my league_ , Bucky had said when he’d seen the photo of her from Paris. Hah. Natalia _had_ been rich, after Grand-mère died – rich enough at least to do whatever she wanted without worrying about it overmuch. Natasha Romanov hadn’t exactly been poor. But maybe she was reverting to type, after all these years, she thought, surveying herself in the changing room mirror, smoothing the soft black dress over her hips.

If she was, she’d earned it.

+++

There was a car in the street outside when they got back to the house, and lights were burning in the kitchen windows.

“Damn!” Bucky muttered. Round the side of the house, up the front steps and through the door, guns at the ready; their visitor had been cooking, of all things, the last vestiges of dust and neglect in the house chased out by a smell of something rich and savoury and meaty. Natasha heard Bucky take a deep breath; his footsteps faltered. He caught her elbow. Then, pulling her gently back, he wandered along the corridor and paused in the kitchen doorway, the gun at his side.

“The future taught you to cook?” he said disbelievingly.

“Well,” said Steve Rogers. “I couldn’t find any shoes to shine.”

+++

It was stew: Bucky’s mother’s recipe, and it looked delicious. Natalia stole a spoonful while the boys were hugging. Steve had brought beer with him too; they cracked the bottles open and sat at the kitchen table. He looked better than she’d seen him look – maybe ever. His hair was a little longer, and he’d dyed it a shade darker than usual; he’d also let his beard grow in, which seemed to be recent: he kept rubbing a hand through it, as if he wasn’t used to it yet. But there were fewer shadows in his eyes, and he seemed more relaxed, as if he’d laid some burden down when he’d walked away from the Avengers. She was glad for him.

“Ross is having dealings with someone called Lukin,” he explained, and didn’t miss the sharp look that passed between Bucky and Natalia. “Tony apparently looked into him, found a few leads that petered out, and was looking for you, Nat, to try and get your help. When he couldn’t find you he texted me, and then Clint rang him back and told him to fuck off and leave you alone, and he wouldn’t talk to me and I don’t know how T’Challa heard about it, but he called me and let me know where you were and the information you had on Markov.” Steve laughed a little. “He said if there was anything Bucky needed to call, but other than that would I please keep my kindergarten off his doorstep, which… fair enough.”

He was trying to find it funny, but you could tell it hurt him.

“Hmm,” Natalia said. “Stark doesn’t know where I am?”

“No,” said Steve.

“Good. I can handle Lukin, but I want nothing to do with Stark.”

Bucky glanced at her. She leaned back in her chair and sipped her beer, watching Steve’s fingers tap on his own bottle.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said.

“Then don’t start,” Natalia said. “I’m sick of cleaning up his messes. He can get himself another janitor.”

Steve’s lips quirked. She shrugged at him, smiling.

“What’s Lukin been doing?” Bucky wanted to know.

“I don’t know exactly,” said Steve. “Like I said, Tony’s not talking to me.”

“Hmm.” Bucky glanced away.

Steve said, “I won’t pretend I’m sorry –”

“For lying to him?”

“I apologised for _that_.”

Bucky heaved a sigh. “Steve,” he said. “ _I’m sorry you’re pissed off that I’m in the right_ is not exactly an apology.”

Natalia choked on her beer laughing, but Steve’s jaw was set, and he was glaring at Bucky across the table.

“Anyway, what’s your excuse,” he said. “This – you said that –”

“It worked,” said Bucky. “The serum worked, Steve. It healed the brain damage. The triggers are gone.”

Steve’s mouth opened; then he flushed an angry red. “And what, you were gonna wait till Christmas to let me know?”

“Irina’s after the serum,” Bucky said patiently. He was careful not to look at Natasha: he was lying to Steve, or only telling part of the truth at least, for her sake, because it was her secret. She caught her breath, her whole body tense. “If she wants a sample, you are the ultimate –”

“Excuses,” said Steve angrily. “You lied to me, both of you, you –”

“God almighty!” Natalia slammed her beer bottle down on the table. All the hurt and the sense of betrayal came rushing back to unbalance her: all Natasha Romanov’s screwed up stupid feelings that, for the past thirty-six hours, she’d found so easy to distance herself from, crashed over her like a wave breaking, unravelling her self-control. She was lightheaded with anger between one breath and the next. “Why the hell would I trust you, Steve? What have you done lately that would make me trust you ever again? You don’t talk to me, you don’t listen to me when _I_ talk, you tell me you trust me and you throw it back in my face by treating me like an enemy, and then you pack your things and vanish off into the blue –”

“I tried to find you,” Steve said, visibly controlling himself, “we all did, Clint and Laura have been _frantic_ , don’t even _start_. Even Tony’s frantic, or he wouldn’t have called me.”

“The lot of you can take your concern and shove it up your asses, you egotistical little pricks.” Her accent had come undone. She was so angry the insult came out in Russian, the English words eluding her completely. “You broke everything I had between you because you couldn’t fucking get over yourselves, and now you think you’ve a right to be _concerned_ about me? It’s a little late for that, Steve!” She was on her feet, the chair had toppled when she’d jumped up, her hands shaking, and she had to walk away from him, right then, at once, turn her back and pace around the kitchen with her fists clenched.

Steve sat stunned for long moments. Then he said, “You know why I –”

“Leave me out of this,” said Bucky harshly.

“I was trying to keep you safe!” Steve said. “You know what happened, you know what –”

“I know. I know a hell of a lot better than you do, and you don’t get to use me for a justification for your screw ups.”

“I saved you!”

“Yeah, and maybe I woulda been better dead!” Bucky’s voice rose to a shout to drown out Steve’s, and Natalia swung back around with an angry protest in time to see Steve go white to the lips, haul off and punch Bucky in the face.

He went over backwards, smashing into the table and sending it toppling; the bottles shattered, and he sprawled in a pile of kindling and a puddle of beer and laughed at Steve, his lip split and bleeding.

“Oh fuck me, there you are. Didn’t I tell you you liked getting punched?” And he levelled himself up and barrelled into Steve, and they both went over yelling insults, in a pile of thrashing limbs. Natalia dived for the stove to turn the heat off – she was sorely tempted to throw the stew over the both of them – they were thrashing about like a couple of schoolboys, all finesse and training utterly forgotten. Steve’s breath was coming in loud angry pants, and Bucky was laughing at him – taunting him.

“Come on, asshole, all this time and that’s the best you can do? You think you gotta right to barge back into my life and do what you want with it like I’m a possession you dropped in ’45 and now you want it back ‘cause the replacements just don’t work as well, you sonovabitch, I told you how it would end, I stayed away for a motherfucking _reason_ , but no, oh no, Steve Rogers knows best, he’s gotta enlist and he’s gotta volunteer for science experiments and he’s gotta put on a pair of tights and save the motherfucking world, even if it don’t want saving.” By his furious flushed face and the rushed way the words burst out of him they had been waiting to be said for a damn long time, and that hit Natalia like a slap in the face. Better dead, better dead. Oh _god_.

“Fuck you,” said Steve, an explosion of uncontrolled profanity Natalia was completely unused to from him, “fuck you, you think I wanted this, I wanted you safe, you are the only thing I got left –”

“Yeah, well, I got nothing left, thanks very much,” said Bucky, white-faced as they parted, panting. “ _Nothing_ , you hear me? At least you got to bury your Mom yourself,” and Jesus _Christ_ that was – that was – Natalia scrambled out of the way when Steve threw himself at Bucky again, too stunned to intervene. Was this how they’d always been? Who they each allowed the other to be? The only other person in the world who could take it… They staggered across half the kitchen, cursing and hitting and yanking at each other, and Steve crashed them both into one of the cabinets and snarled, “You don’t get to drag me through my whole fucking life and then leave me alone when I need you the most,” and Bucky said, “Was it worth it? _Was it fucking worth it_?” His voice cracked, on the verge of tears. He had Steve in a headlock, how she didn’t know, they smashed into the doorjamb and fell into the passage, Steve flailing helplessly in Bucky’s grip, too pissed off to free himself, and choked out, “You promised me – at her funeral _you promised me_ ,” and Bucky said, “I killed Howard, you asshole, _I killed him_ , I choked his wife to death and walked away and didn’t even know it when he called me by my own damn name,” and Steve made a great helpless gasping noise and fell silent, his body heaving with sobs.

Natalia stumbled away from the door and sat down hard on the kitchen floor, spilt beer soaking into the seat of her pants. She couldn’t face the grief and the anger in that passage, couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t. Maman had done this – Maman had done this to two men she loved, and to Tony too, who had been her friend for almost as long as Clint had, and she wrapped her arms around her knees hid her face and shook, until at last there was silence in the corridor, and then quiet voices, and footsteps, and arms around her.

+++

“You co-dependent masochistic assholes,” she said. She wasn’t angry – she was too tired, and she understood them too well. There was crushed glass in Bucky’s shoulder, the rills of his prosthetic; they were both bruised and cut all over. She felt very exposed in the harsh light of the upstairs bathroom as she helped them both clean up: raw and naked and vulnerable. Her eyes were hot and aching, her throat swollen. This was not the time to start wailing like a child; it wasn’t about her.

Steve glanced at her, but he was still and silent and didn’t say anything. She sat next to him on the edge of the bath – Bucky behind her – pulling splinters out of Steve’s knuckles with a pair of tweezers, her hands steadier than she’d thought they would be. When she looked at their faces she could see the calm in both of them, the way the adrenaline and then the pain had quieted those thousand clamouring voices wanting attention and validation. Something festering had been lanced, drained.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Bucky said quietly.

She laughed softly. “Is this the point where all your ex-girlfriends cut their losses and ran?”

That earned her a pair of twin, faint smiles. There was a peace in Steve’s voice when he spoke, the clear, carrying tones softened at long long last into something more casual, slurred.

“You’ve changed.”

She hummed. “Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I took the serum too.” He drew a breath. She laughed again, quiet as before. “It cleaned out some cobwebs. Steve.” He met her eyes at last; his left one spectacularly black and bloodshot, the right one clear and steady. “I’m sorry. For Leipzig. I waited too long to take a stand. I looked at you and I looked at Tony and I thought that _he_ was the unstable one, the one who’d go off-grid and throw everything into chaos. I told myself that if you needed me you’d come to me, and that in the mean while this was the only way to protect you. I should have pushed you harder. I’m sorry.”

He shook his head, very slowly. “You did what you thought was right.”

She sighed. “Yeah.”

After a moment, he said, “Would you sign them again? The Accords?”

For the long moments it took to swab his hand and wrap it in bandages, she was silent. At last she said, “Yes.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. She smiled. “Steve. I’ve been made mindless enough; it won’t ever happen again. But I’ve heard that line, too, so many times. Too many times. We’re the only ones who understand. We’re protecting people. We’re helping people. They don’t know it, but this is for their own good.”

“It’s not –”

“Shush. We have power, Steve. We don’t get to inflict it on other people just because they don’t.”

“It’s not _inflicting_.” He was very tense, his hands clenched.

“Yes it is. If they don’t get a say, that’s exactly what it is.”

He looked away, his poor bruised face very stiff. Bucky put his hand on her hip, but didn’t speak.

“I won’t be used again,” she repeated. “But I won’t become Irina, either. I won’t sit on that hill and look down on everyone and think, I have the strength and they don’t, so I get to do it. There has to be a middle ground.”

“They didn’t offer us one.” His voice grated, but as she’d spoken he’d shuddered all over, as if something she’d said had touched a nerve at last.

“Then maybe we should have sat down and offered _them_ one, instead of you fucking off to Bucharest and ploughing through a platoon of elite soldiers like a hot knife through butter ‘cause they touched your toys,” she said dryly.

Behind her, Bucky started to laugh; even Steve managed a grin, though it didn’t last.

“You’re talking about a government that let itself be run by Hydra. That uses other people as weapons, as _things_ –”

“No, no, it’s still not about me,” said Bucky.

“It is,” said Steve flatly. “It is about you. How many more of us – Thor and Bruce and you, Tasha – and what the hell is the good of this if I can’t even protect –” But he stopped short, breathing hard again, blinking. “I have a responsibility.”

“You have a responsibility not to turn into Alexander Pierce,” she said, and gripped his wrist tight when he jerked away from her. “You have a responsibility to admit that you’re human, and you make mistakes, and when those mistakes end people’s lives you don’t get to go on making them as if nothing happened –” She stopped because he was crying, silent and stoic but very clearly tears.

“Mistakes that end people’s lives,” he said bitterly. “Yeah.”

She thought Bucky raised his head. “Steve,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

White-lipped, he said, “I let –”

“You nearly came off that train yourself trying to grab a hold of me. _It wasn’t your fault_.”

There, he was shaking properly now, swallowing back sobs. _I let you fall_. Oh darling. “Shh.” She reached out and rubbed her hand through the bristly hair at the back of his neck comfortingly. “It’s all right. We don’t need to fix this tonight…”

Steve sniffed hard, fighting his way back to calm; he drew his sleeve across his eyes like a boy and breathed slowly. At last he looked at her. His eyes travelled over her, as if examining her for the first time; for a moment they lingered on Bucky’s fingers at her hip. She forced herself to keep her hands still, the need to keep him safe and secret warring with the desire to lace their fingers tight and pull him even closer.

Steve sighed. “I just,” he said, and gave a bitter smile. “I wanted everyone safe. What they did to Wanda…” He shook his head. She was still holding on to one of his hands; he brought the other up to cup the nape of her neck, leaning his forehead against hers.

“Tasha?” he said softly.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry I hurt you.”

Breathless for a moment. She wrapped her arms around his neck, hid her face in his shoulder. He pulled her into his lap, holding her tight.

“Apology accepted.”

He sighed again, an exhalation of relief that shook him. It was only then that she realised how he’d missed her, and remembered how she’d missed him in turn…

She could still be Natasha, like this. There was so much that was worth it. She had Bucky, and a place to stand, and above all else herself, whole and entire. Natasha was not as small a part of that as she’d first thought.

+++

They’d been too tired to make up another bed, and anyway – though none of them would have said it out loud – none of them were willing to leave either of the others. Steve crawled into bed with them, and fell asleep with one long arm flung across both Natasha and Bucky’s hips. The night was quiet, and they slept for a few hours in perfect peace, but at some point a nightmare shook Natasha awake. Steve had rolled away, no longer touching them, and she sat up, shivering, breathing hard. Rubble and bombs and Nikolai’s blood sticky on her hands… Natasha pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, shaking. What point crying? It was seventy years ago.

Hell.

Bucky had woken; he touched her back, and when she relaxed in response, welcoming him, he sat up and pulled her gently back into his arms.

“Hey.”

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” she whispered, and snuggled shamelessly.

“S’OK. Nightmare?”

“Already forgotten it,” she promised. No moonlight tonight – it must be cloudy – yet Natasha could still see his dear face perfectly well, bruises and all. She reached up to touch him thoughtfully, wondering what else the serum had changed that she hadn’t taken notice of yet. Strength, speed, endurance? She smiled, wondering if the sex counted. Behind her Steve was breathing deep and steady. That comforted her too, the sound of Steve breathing.

Bucky’s fingers in her hair, her head pillowed on his bicep, her leg slung over his. Her fingertips on his split lip, the swollen flesh over his cheekbone. His mouth curled a little, one-sided, trying not to pull his lip open.

“Tasha?”

“Better dead, huh.”

“Ah. Hmm.” He looked faintly rueful.

“That sounded like it had been waiting to come out for a long while.”

“I’ve been a mess, in case you hadn’t noticed.” That came out with a little bit of an edge.

Natasha bit her lip. “You hung in there.”

“Yeah.” Bucky glanced past her, looking at the line of Steve’s body in the dark. “Had Steve.” He ran his other hand down her side, body-warm metal fingers on the bare skin between her panties and her top. “Have you.”

He could make her warm all over with just two words. Blush like a schoolgirl being complimented by a handsome man for the first time, too. Natasha hoped he didn’t notice; then she decided she didn’t care. Why shouldn’t he know exactly how he made her feel?

Bucky grinned when he saw, delighted with himself. Gently he kissed her forehead. “The one good thing, Natalia. The only good thing.”

“Yes.” She nuzzled at his neck, feeling the rise and fall of his chest against her, smelling his skin. She kissed his pulse point gently. “For me, too.”

+++

Again Bucky woke early, disorientated. His head ached, and he was thirsty, but for a good few minutes he was still too comfortable to get up. He and Tasha had moved apart sometime in the night; she was curled close to Steve’s side, and it made him smile to see them together, these two people he loved.

They’d both been through so much. Irina Natalia’s _mother_ , god almighty. And Steve was exhausted. He looked better than he had before Siberia, but he still wasn’t right.

Finally a growing need for coffee, and a few moments alone, had him slipping out of bed and pulling his pants on. Neither of them woke as he left the room; good. Let them sleep. If Irina did decide to put in an appearance they’d be in trouble soon enough.

Downstairs the kitchen looked even worse, in the grey dawn light, than it had last night. Bucky sighed. Coffee first. Then, as that was brewing, the comforting smell filling up the room, he filled the sink with hot water and dug out a couple of cloths. Baking soda, elbow grease. His mother would have been proud. By the time Steve stumbled downstairs shirtless and tousle-headed Bucky was reading yesterday’s newspaper and working on his third cup of coffee.

“Where,” said Steve, the same way he said every morning, and Bucky pointed him to the mugs without speaking, the same way he did every morning.

After a moment he said, “More’n two.”

“Yah.” Steve yawned, nearly cracking his jaw in the process, and buried half his face in the mug. “Thanks for tidying up.”

“Like you would have.”

“Hey. I’m tidy. You’re fastidious.”

Bucky laughed. A few minutes later, when Steve was pouring his second cup – and thus conveniently not looking at Bucky – he said, “Buck.”

Uh-oh. “Yeah?”

“Am I too used to this?”

“Huh? Used to what?”

Steve turned to look at him. “This.” He gestured at himself.

Oh. For a moment or two Bucky looked at him. Then he said, “Yes.”

Steve didn’t flinch, which in Steve terms was a flinch. “Ouch,” he said.

“Don’t ask me questions if you know you ain’t gonna like the answers.”

“I didn’t –” said Steve, and sighed. “It’s just, what Nat said last night. About having power.”

“She always knows exactly how to get under your skin,” Bucky agreed. “Look, Steve.” He sighed. “It’s not 1938 anymore, you know. You sat on that lab table and you let Howard make you into that” – he waved his hand in a gesture that encompassed Steve’s… everything – “and you made yourself into somebody who matters, somebody people listen to. You can’t keep going around acting like you don’t, like no-one’s gonna listen to you anyway because you’re still that dumb kid from Brooklyn. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the real problem is that you never got used to it.”

“Is that the kind of asshole that you think I am?” Steve sounded weary. Or bitter. Possibly both.

“Yep.” Bucky was unrepentant. “You’ve always been that asshole. Look at Leipzig –”

“We were trying –”

“I know what we were trying to do. We thought Zemo wanted those assets and we needed to stop him. That was all right. But you dragged your friends – half of ‘em _kids_ – into it –”

“They knew what was at stake!”

“Steve, for god’s sake. Of course they did. I’m saying there was other ways, and we didn’t take ‘em.” _I should have pushed you_ , Natalia had said last night, as if it were her job to keep Steve on the straight and narrow and not Bucky’s. He’d failed them both… “But that didn’t even occur to them.”

"I didn't manipulate them into it," said Steve, and Bucky groaned at him.

"You didn't have to. They've been reading those stupid comic books and watching you save the world from space aliens, and they believe in you, Steve. They're followin' a painted target and a spangly outfit. What would've happened to them if we'd both died in Siberia? Still be in that prison camp, probably."

"Natasha would have -"

"Don't you put this on Tasha," Bucky said angrily. "She's got enough going on on her own account. This is on you and me, we made this between us. You by doing what you always do and me by being too out of it to know when to put a boot up your ass."

"If it's not on Tasha it sure as hell isn't on you," said Steve.

"Yeah it is," said Bucky. "I'm the NCO."

Steve snorted. "So's Sam, come to that."

"Steve, he doesn't know you. None of 'em know you, not all of you, not to put a finger on your fuckups and tell you when to stop."

That made Steve angry of course. "I am not Becca," he snapped. "I don't need you to sit me down at the kitchen table and teach me left from right and A from B."

"Well then you better pull your head out of your ass and learn it on your own," Bucky shot back. "It wouldn’t matter a damn if it were still just you and me, Steve, but it _isn’t_. Those kids deserve better from you than fucking prison camps. Following - thinking they're following Captain America into the jaws of death, instead of Steve Rogers down a back alley." He snorted. "I mean, Jesus, Stark's face. It was like the Pope had stood up in the middle of Sunday Mass and told the congregation he was converting to Hinduism."

Steve shouted with laughter, but it didn't stop him being angry. "You know what I think?" he said. "I think you like being needed, and it pisses you off when you feel like you ain't."

Bucky sucked in a surprised breath. Used to being needed, sure. Liking it... that made him stumble. Did he? Did it even matter to him what he was needed for, as long as – god. When he found his voice again he said, "Yeah, I guess that makes two of us, or you'd have left me alone in Bucharest like you knew damn well I wanted you to."

Steve's jaw clenched. Then he looked away, and his face and stance went soft and defeated and small. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Yeah I guess so."

Something that had been knotted tight and angry in Bucky's chest for years broke open then, and he saw the thin hunched body and the angular face he missed so much; rare were the occasions, even when he'd been small, that Steve had seemed small, and Bucky remembered Aunt Sarah's funeral then - _at her funeral you promised me_ , Steve had said last night. And from much further back: _as soon as he heard it was you it was like someone had flipped a switch in him_ , and Carter's comforting smile…

"Take a fucking decade for us to put right," he said.

Steve looked at him. For long moments his face was still and dark, as if he hadn’t understood. But he had heard the pronoun perfectly well, and he knew that Bucky did not break his promises, or renege on his boasts.

It cut Bucky to the quick when he understood that Steve no longer knew how to believe him. Seconds passed; he didn’t move, not even to blink. At last a shiver took a hold of Steve, and he set his jaw the way he did before a fight and made himself smile. "The uniform was your idea, pal."

God Bucky was proud of him.

"Yeaaaaah," he said slowly. "About that. Carter bet me a bottle of black market whiskey I couldn't get you to keep it."

Steve's jaw dropped. Then he sat back down in the chair at last and laughed until he cried with it.

+++

Natasha felt a little guilty for taking so long in the shower after Steve had apparently volunteered to make breakfast – it didn’t exactly seem polite – but Bucky was not the least bit bothered when he ducked into the stall with her, and refused to be hurried. Once she let him pin her against the cool tile wall, her feet slipping a little on the floor and his body all heat and solid strength behind her, that was where she stayed until he was happy with his own handiwork, and her calling him _James_ all the way through it and pulling on his hair didn’t even break his concentration.

God she loved it when he got all demanding with her. Besides, she thought, looking at herself in the mirror afterwards, hadn’t she earned it? The marks of his fingers at her hips ached pleasantly, and she was in an intensely and terrifyingly good mood when she joined Steve in the kitchen.

“I forgot there was another bathroom,” she said when she realised he was dressed and clean. “I’m sorry!”

“That’s OK.” Natasha thought that under the bruises Steve was blushing. She smiled, and leaned up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek.

“Thank you for breakfast.”

“You’re very welcome.”

By silent, mutual consent they talked of nothing important while they ate – not even what Steve had been up to in the last year. Whatever had passed between Steve and Bucky this morning before Natasha had woken had cemented last night’s peace, it seemed. When Bucky leaned on Steve’s shoulder to reach past him and pick a mug off the table Steve turned his head to stare at the arm lying casually across him as if no one in his life had ever touched him before. For a second his face was very still, and Natasha ached for him. Then he grinned a bit, and suddenly they were always touching – jostling each other, elbows in ribs, hands on chests and arms over shoulders. It was lovely.

It wasn’t until they were standing on the back porch, smoking and looking out over the overgrown garden, that Natasha, watching the yellowing leaves on the trees by the back fence, finally said, “About Markov.” She couldn’t look at Bucky; she knew he’d stay still and let her tell it however she needed to.

“She’s after the serum?” Steve sounded thoughtful.

“No, I don’t think so. At least, not primarily. My guess is, she doesn’t want Lukin to have it.” She sighed. “The thing is, she’s my mother.”

Blank silence. After a moment she turned round to face him. Steve was leaning against the wall by the kitchen window: he was staring at her, his mouth open in a surprised ‘o’.

“But,” he said at last, “your parents –”

Natasha waved her hand. “Faked,” she said. “The graves, the paper trail, everything.”

“Oh Nat. I’m so sorry.”

Her breathing hitched; something burned hot behind her eyes before she blinked it back. “I’m OK.”

“Uh huh.” His mouth quirked, one eyebrow arched; he held out a hand to her, and she dropped her cigarette into the ashtray and walked into his arms. He ran as hot as Bucky, his heartrate elevated, and he held her just as tight. She pressed her aching face into his shoulder and thought, _it’s all right now, we’re safe_ , even though it wasn’t and they weren’t.

“It’s OK,” she repeated. “I’ve always known what she was. Probably for longer than I was prepared to admit to myself… it’s been a long time.”

For a couple of moments Steve was silent; then he drew back to look down at her, rubbing his hand comfortingly down her back. “Nat,” he said slowly. Then, glancing at Bucky, “You – not born in 1984, then?”

Uh-oh. Natasha pulled a face at him. “Um. No.”

Steve’s eyes narrowed. “Older than me?”

“It’s not polite to –”

“I mean, you don’t have to answer, but I feel like not answering is also kind of an answer.”

Now he was trying hard not to grin. Natasha shook her head at him, fuming.

“ _Definitely_ older than me.”

“Historically, in my experience, a feature, not a bug,” Bucky said while Natasha groaned.

Steve just snorted. “So how much –”

“November 1917, OK, just stop.” Natasha flung her hands up and took out another cigarette – now she knew why she found them comforting; Grand-mère had smoked Gauloises as if they were going out of fashion before they were even in fashion. Steve was laughing; Bucky said, “Hah, still the oldest,” and lit her cigarette with a practiced little gesture that made her smile. 

“All right,” said Steve. “So Markov…”

“…doesn’t want me dead,” Natasha said. “I think that’s clear. I make no guarantees for either of you.”

“Fair enough.” Steve looked thoughtful. “Did you say she hated Lukin?”

“I did. What’s he doing with Ross?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t. He’s up to something that’s making Tony suspicious, but…”

Natasha snorted. “He’ll be wearing a long black cape and twirling a moustache in public then.”

“Don’t,” said Steve. “I want to make this right –”

“ _You_ don’t. I meant what I said last night. I’m sick of being Tony’s janitor.”

“And mine?” He looked sardonic.

“After last night?” Natasha said. “I trust you.”

That rocked him back on his heels, wide-eyed. Natasha laughed at him. How typical of Steve to trust others because of their vulnerabilities but refuse to believe that they would return the favour. After a moment he reeled her in for another hug, which, well. If tactile and huggable was the real Steve Rogers Natasha would take it and then some. He even kissed her temple.

“Be honest, though, you’re really angry about Leipzig.”

“Furious,” she said readily. And there was that not insignificant part of her that wanted to shank Tony for what he’d done to her darling boy, but that was by the by, and also between Bucky and Tony and therefore none of her business. “Did you know Parker’s fifteen? Because I didn’t, not until afterwards.”

“ _What_! The kid, the –”

“Yeah.”

“Christ,” Bucky muttered. “I could tell he was young.”

“ _Fifteen_.” Steve lit another cigarette, grim. “Still, we need to talk to him. We need to know what Lukin’s after.”

“Will he take T’Challa’s calls?” Bucky asked. “I should let him know we’re OK, come to think of it.”

“I don’t know,” Steve said again. “I’m sure he’ll take Nat’s, he’s worried, but…”

“God!” Natasha said. “All right. All _right_. I’ll call him now and then it’s done.” She reached round to her back pants pocket and only then remembered she was wearing a dress. Hell. Where –

Bucky reached over to the window-sill and held her phone out to her wordlessly.

“Thank you, darling.” Natasha tapped Tony’s number in. Steve looked away, grinning. The phone rang for several long seconds before Tony picked up.

“Stark,” he said. “Who –”

“Romanov,” Natasha said cheerfully. No sense in starting a fight. “Do _not_ trace this call, please...”

Tony made a funny noise. “Tony!” he said, with bitter false cheer and sarcasm. “Hey, how are you, all good, long time no talk, sorry for running out on you like an asshole –”

And just like that Natasha was choking with fury. An apology would have been a bloody miracle, mon Dieu, but a _how are you, can I help_ , that might have been within the bounds of the possible, the reasonable to expect. All her habitual self-control went up in smoke for the second time in less than fifteen hours, and when she answered it was with a burst of pure, venomous temper of a kind that she’d not been permitted – or permitted herself – since 1945.

“Spare me your _bullshit_ , you mendacious little egotist. I hear you’re stalking me; tell me about Lukin and then _go fuck yourself._ ”

Ringing silence.

Bucky was making that face at her that meant he was trying not to say something and wanted you to know it. Steve had buried his face in his coffee mug, presumably to shut himself up. Natasha marched past them, breathing hard, and walked out into the garden, the grass tall enough to brush her legs above her boots. On the other end of the line, Natasha could hear Tony’s own footsteps, his breathing; then a door closed.

“Are you OK?” Tony asked.

“Aw,” Natasha said. “Now you care.”

Tony sighed. “Look,” he said, “I said some stuff, you said some stuff, everything was awful and then it got worse, it was nearly two years ago, let’s just not.”

“So you’ve been looking for me because you’ve got no one left to babysit you at your next birthday party?”

She damn well hoped he flinched. “Low blow, Romanov.”

“Oh poor baby. You lied to me about Parker, you broke everything I tried to build for myself because you think the world revolves around your issues, and you –” _beat the man I love half to death over something he had no control over and no choice in_. She couldn’t say that to him, no matter how angry it made her. It was his parents, for god’s sake, just because she hated her mother didn’t mean that everyone did. And she couldn’t let him know anything about herself and Bucky under any circumstances. She saved the whole speech by sighing instead, as if she was too tired to finish. “Oh, what does it matter. Just tell me about Lukin.”

“Parker has nothing to do with this!”

“You put a fifteen year old _child_ onto a battlefield with me,” Natasha snarled. “With _me_. Are you really that convinced the world revolves around your dick that you don’t know about my past?” Too late she remembered that it wasn’t her past, not really. God her head hurt.

“That’s seriously not –”

“No, no, nothing – except as yet more proof that you respect no one outside of yourself.”

“That’s not true!” Tony exploded. “And you know what, Romanov, fuck you fucking sideways. What, you thought you could wipe yourself off the face of the earth for nearly two years and then call back and have everything be fine because you needed a favour?”

Natasha hung up. At the other end of the garden she heard Bucky murmur, _she wouldn’t be this angry if she didn’t care about the guy_ , and Steve murmur back, _I know_.

She gave them both the finger. She hadn’t smoked in seventy years but apparently she was going to have to go through the entire pack to get a tenth of the nicotine buzz she remembered from the war. (It crossed her mind then that the wine at lunch in the city yesterday hadn’t given her a buzz, either.) She was so angry her hands were shaking; lighting the cigarette took three tries. She’d smoked it halfways down before Tony called back.

“All right,” Tony said. “I’m the one who needs a favour.”

“You don’t say,” Natasha said tiredly. “You know what, I don’t care. I am too tired for any of this. For all of it. Tell me what you need.”

Tony sighed too. “Nat,” he said, and stopped, and sighed again. “OK. Lukin turns up a few months ago out of the blue and there is nothing…” She could picture the way he was gesticulating, talking with his hands as he explained. “Nothing there. He pops up like he was invented last year, like somebody made him in a lab. So that made me a little suspicious, or a lot more suspicious than I already was, and I dug a little deeper, and found some stuff that had the KGB’s sticky fingerprints all over it, and that was when I… thought of you.”

“He’s Hydra,” Natasha said. “Lukin. Mostly Hydra. He’s a vicious little psychopath… some of them had ideals, you know, there was a level on which they believed they were changing the world, that they would make everything… better. Pierce was one of those. Lukin’s primary priority is himself. He likes power. He likes hurting people.”

Tony was briefly quiet. “Can you prove it?”

Natasha found she was biting her left thumb thoughtfully. “I hope so,” she said. “It’ll take me a week or two. What does he want?”

“Lukin? Power I guess.” Tony seemed to think about it. “Look,” he said slowly. “Ross isn’t Hydra. Whatever else he’s up to…”

Natasha snorted. “He’s sold Ross something. Information, assets…”

“In exchange for immunity. That’s what I’m thinking. Ross likes power too.”

“He does.” She thought it over. “If I can prove Lukin is Hydra…”

“I can get it to people who won’t ignore it,” said Tony. “I hope. T’Challa might help.”

“I’m sure he will, for this.”

“All right,” said Tony. He paused. “Do you need anything? Money? Resources?”

“No and no,” Natasha said. “Thank you. I’ll be in touch.”

“Great. That. Great.” Tony was awkward now, hesitant. “You’re – OK?”

Natasha grimaced. Was she? Seventy years’ worth of memories she didn’t much want, on the whole, and her pernicious bitch of a mother back in her life, sort of, and slowly she was beginning to suspect that she was about as fundamentally incapable of walking away from a fight as Steve himself. Not the most comfortable thing to learn about yourself. But Steve had come to them and apologised and meant it, loved her and worried for her, and Bucky… she had no idea where to start defining what she and Bucky were to one another, aside from helplessly saying, _everything_. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

“Good. I’m – good.” Tony fidgeted for another second. “Rhodey’s doing OK.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Natasha smiled a little, let it show in her voice.

“Yeah. So.” And all at once Tony took a deep breath and said, “Have you – have you spoken to Cap, then?”

Oh, honey, Natasha thought. She looked back at the porch: the guys were standing close to one another by the kitchen door, and Steve was smiling – Bucky was saying something and Steve was smiling, huge and genuine and ear to ear, the way he did in those old film reels in the Smithsonian, the way none of the Avengers had ever seen him smile in life.

“I’ve seen Steve,” she said, gentle.

Tony was quiet. “Is he –”

Well, what did you say to that. _The man whose hands killed your parents makes him happy. I’ve never known him sleep longer or more soundly than in our bed last night. I regret very much how your and my friendship ended but it killed me to think I’d lost Steve_. There was something here, in the width of Steve’s smile, in the animation in Bucky’s handsome face, something new and fragile and precious that bubbled in her chest and made her light-headed. Her breath caught.

“Fine,” Natasha said quietly. “He’s fine. I’ve got to go. Be well, Tony.”

“I – yeah,” said Tony. “You too.”

She stood looking down at the phone screen after she’d hung up, wondering where he was, if he and Pepper were OK. There was always something boyish about Tony: a part of him had never really grown out of adolescence. It made him likeable, charming, but it also made him a massive prick: the impenetrable self-centredness of a teenaged boy.

Natasha was a hundred years old and entirely fed up with teenagers.

It occurred to her that she probably owed Clint and Laura an apology. Back across the garden, slowly, rubbing her thumb over the phone screen. Steve was talking about the Chitauri invasion, and Bucky was smiling at him, a real, warm, loving smile. This was where she’d laid her love… Natasha went to him and put her arms around his waist, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

“I was just getting to the part about the flying sled,” Steve said cheerfully.

“Ugh. Skip it.”

“No, that was _great_.”

Natasha laughed. She put her head on Bucky’s shoulder, smelling cigarette smoke and the coffee on his breath. His body was so warm, the rhythm of his breathing comforting, soothing. He was playing with her hair, a silly little intimacy he’d never allowed himself before. She hoped he never stopped.

Steve said, “You two…”

They both looked up. He was smiling, soft and sad. “You –” He gestured, shook his head. “I don’t even know what to ask.”

“They wiped us, it wasn’t fun, let’s not talk about it,” said Bucky, wry.

Steve nodded slowly. “And now? Lukin aside, what now?”

Bucky looked down at Natasha. His expression was unreadable. _You know what I am_ , he’d said in Rostov, _I don’t expect_ … She laced her fingers together at his hip.

“Not many people even get second chances.”

“To do what?” Bucky asked quietly. “You said you were sick of fighting. I’m sick of being hunted; that’s not the same… what if I can do some good with this after all?”

“About the only thing keeping Natasha Romanov from walking back into the Kremlin and asking them to wipe her was pure stubbornness,” Natasha said ruefully.

“Well yeah, I have a type.” He gestured at Steve.

She snorted. “My point is – that girl’s gone, you know.”

“Very determined,” he said, “to do the right thing.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And you’re not? Hang around here –”

“A little longer, all right, all _right_.” He kissed her, laughing, a quick, sweet, reassuring kiss that made Natasha sigh.

“Steve just wants to know if we’re coming with him when this is over.”

“Haven’t we walked away from each other enough?” said Steve.

“He’s not subtle,” Natasha said to Bucky.

“No, he never has been.”

Steve had the grace and good sense not to say anything, but his smile was slow and warm and lovely.

+++

The morning they planned to leave Natasha was woken by Steve shaking her foot. She kicked at him fondly, wrapped up in the covers and Bucky’s warm body. Steve tugged at her leg insistently.

“C’mon.”

“Where to?” 

“Downstairs. Up and at ‘em, Romanov.”

“Ugh.” Grumbling, Natasha slid out of Bucky’s arms and tucked the covers round him; he shifted and muttered, reaching for her, and she kissed him. “We’re downstairs.”

He made a rumbling sort of noise in his chest and went right back to sleep. Steve laughed softly – he was wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, and threw her own at her as she stood up. He waited for her on the stairs while she changed in the bathroom, and took her down to the basement, where he’d closed the trap door and moved the washer and the wine rack to optimise the space.

“What,” Natasha said grumpily.

Steve put his hands on his hips. “Take a swing.”

“What,” she said again, eyebrows raised in amusement.

“Take a swing,” Steve repeated. “You took the serum, yeah?”

“Yes,” she said slowly.

“So take a swing.”

“I _think_ I still remember how to kick your ass!”

“No you don’t! Everything you think you know about your reflexes is wrong, now. Your balance, how fast you are, the force you put into every kick or punch, it’s all wrong. Trust me. You wanna work this out now.”

“Hmm. I hadn’t thought...”

“It’ll be weird. Take a swing. Come on,” he added, mischievous, “you’ve been wanting to do it since Germany.”

“That’s… not untrue.” Natasha grinned at him, settling into a comfortable stance; Steve beckoned to her, laughing, and then it was on.

When Bucky came to find them nearly an hour later she was only just beginning to feel winded, and Steve was in the lead, seven to four.

“Having fun?”

“Being humiliated,” Natasha said, disgusted.

“I told you,” said Steve.

“I taught him everything he knows,” she said to Bucky.

“I could tell,” Bucky said, which had Steve laughing, startled and pleased. “Balance?”

“Everything,” Natasha said gloomily. She laced her fingers together over her head and stretched, up on her tiptoes, leaning left and then right. Steve was leaning against the tumbler, arms crossed; Bucky put his coffee cup down beside him.

“May I?”

Natasha dropped back onto her heels. “Sure.” The last time they’d faced each other she had been trying to hit him hard enough to shake him out of the brainwashing; this brought back grey concrete training halls, Soviet uniforms, a row of grim-faced children watching them demonstrate moves and fighting styles. He was holding back just enough, letting her find her feet, but as they traded kicks and blows and blocks the familiarity washed over her – this was part of what they were too, this gleeful pushing of each other, the back and forth of each of them teaching the other. Suddenly she realised she was grinning fiercely. So was he.

“You’re amazing,” Steve said quietly. When Natasha glanced at him, distracted, he got in a blow of his own, and then it was two against one, both of them trying in smooth unspeaking synchronisation to bring her down; for a few fierce minutes everything was speed and panting and set concentration, and then someone put a foot down wrong and Natasha overbalanced on her next kick and all three of them landed on the freezing floor, yelling and laughing.

+++

Masha was none too pleased to see them again so soon.

“First Irina and now Lukin?”

“It’s not my fault they don’t all stay dead,” Natasha said.

“And who’s this?” She glowered at Steve.

“A friend.”

“Hah.” Masha was unimpressed. She’d ushered them through the little apartment into her dingy kitchen without asking questions, and Natasha had taken a seat at the table without waiting to be invited. Bucky, as before, stood behind her chair, leaning against the wall. The three piece suit made him look more like her bodyguard than ever, and the open collar of his shirt flashed a hint of metal at his shoulder. Natasha wore a dress, a heavy shawl around her shoulders. The sheath of knives at her left thigh pressed into her right where she’d crossed her legs. Yesterday evening she had put her hair into pin curls on autopilot, and only realised what she was doing when half her hair was already done, the movements as instinctive and practiced as ballet forms, cleaning her guns. Of the three of them, only Steve was dressed as if he belonged in this century.

Masha noticed, of course. She was glancing back and forth between them, her face unreadable. “You…”

Bucky leaned forwards. “You knew.”

“I heard rumours.”

“What _about_?”

“Karpov wanted you both eliminated at one point. Given that you were among the best assets he had…”

Spurious. Maman had probably gossiped. If she’d disapproved of Nikolai she would definitely disapprove of James. Natasha considered that thought, and found it good. “Is there anything else you’ve been lying to me about?” 

Masha shrugged. “Don’t misunderstand me, _vdova_ , I fear you, and I fear your Soldier, but I fear your mother even more.”

“Everything, then.” Natasha was disgusted. But she was also, it had to be said, rather wearily unsurprised. Two weeks ago she would have raged, been disappointed, hurt; but let’s be honest, this was all par for the course with Maman. And Masha was doing an excellent job of hanging herself already. “How long has she been watching me?”

“I understand that she traded the Soldier here to Pierce in exchange for your safety when the red rooms were dissolved,” said Masha.

So – always. Natasha rubbed her hand over her face. Par for the course. Hah. Had she ever made a move that Irina had not anticipated, planned for, wanted? Well, she’d fallen in love. Beside her, Bucky stirred. If he dared say it was worth it Natasha would kick him, really she would… but he touched her shoulder and said, “That was then,” very calmly.

He was right. “Lukin,” she said again.

Masha said irritably, “He likes being alive, that’s no puzzle.”

“And he thinks Ross is going to leave him that way out of the goodness of his heart?” Natasha scoffed.

“I expect,” Masha said, “that he’s given him something important in exchange.”

Well, yes. Natasha leaned forwards. “Such as?”

For long minutes Masha smoked in silence. The kitchen was dim and stuffy, cigarette smoke curling in the light of the lamp. Steve, standing by the doorway, shifted his weight from foot to foot, but kept his face impassive. Natasha glared at Masha, who avoided her eyes, expressionless. Only her fingers trembled when she flicked the ash off her cigarette. Bucky was silent too, waiting, watching Masha struggle with herself.

At last he said quietly, “Lukin hasn’t sold him either of us. He’s too smart to jeopardise the deal by antagonising Irina, and Irina wants Natasha alive. It’s no coincidence that she sold _me_ to Pierce and not any of the ones who had Howard’s serum. As long as Natalia loves me, Irina will keep me alive.”

Masha watched him steadily.

“He might well have promised Ross Howard’s perfected serum, but if he knew it existed it would have been long gone by the time Natasha and I got to Rostov. He’d have tortured it out of you years ago. Similarly, he’s not the type to leave assets like the Siberia team to gather dust; if he’d known about those he would have extracted them and put them to some kind of use long before Zemo went off the deep end. Even just as wall decorations.”

Natasha’s heart was beating in her throat. Masha shifted in her chair, grey hair falling over her shoulder. How old was she? Younger than Natasha herself? Older? What possible excuse did she have for being so loyal to Irina for so long – or, alternately, what had Irina been holding over her for so long?

“So. Irina saved Natalia when the red rooms were dissolved. And myself, in a way. What other assets were rescued from the rubble?” Bucky’s voice was hard.

Masha stubbed her cigarette out with a sudden, violent movement, compensation for an expression of anger she could not allow herself to make openly. “The Widows.”

Natasha went cold all over. She heard Bucky’s sharp intake of breath very clearly.

“I don’t follow,” Steve said.

“The Widows,” Masha repeated, a snap of impatience in her voice. “The other graduates. The candidates. Karpov ordered their elimination when Department X was shut down. If he didn’t get to play with his toys anymore, no one else ever would either. Every girl Irina could save, she did.”

“ _How_ ,” Natasha said. It was about the only question her mind had room for.

“The same way she saved you. The chair. New memories, new identities, new lives.”

God above. “How many?”

“Eighteen in total. Twelve Widows, not including yourself. And five of the candidates, the ones…”

“The ones with the most promise? The ones she liked best?” Natasha was sardonic. Typical Maman, to mete out life and death according to her personal likes and dislikes.

“The ones she felt were most likely to survive,” said Masha. “Ksenia, Anna, Olga, Yelena…”

_As long as Natalia loves me, Irina will keep me alive._ Neither Yelena nor Olga fit, but… Natasha bit the inside of her cheek. Then she said, “Ekaterina? Alina? Faina?”

Surprised, Masha nodded.

Not the ones most likely to survive, or not only. Chiefly, Irina had saved the girls that Natasha and Bucky had trained, all those years ago. Bucky put his hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently. Natasha put her hand up to cover his. Her fingers were icy. He didn’t seem to mind.

“Ross won’t be interested in the candidates,” she said. “They hadn’t graduated, which means they hadn’t received the enhancements. He wants super-soldiers, not ordinary assets, no matter how highly-trained.” Had Lukin lied to Ross about what the enhancements did? Before the serum Natasha had never had enhanced strength or speed or senses; she would never age, and she would never carry a living child to term, and she healed quicker than ordinary humans from more severe injuries, though still at nowhere near the speed Steve did. That was all. She couldn’t quite imagine that that alone would satisfy Ross.

Masha lit another cigarette. “I suppose,” she said.

“Who has the information, apart from Irina herself? The technicians?”

“No. Those were killed at once.”

“Of course they were. Who else?”

Masha still couldn’t face her. “Irina brought someone in.”

Ahhh. Tatiana Kirilova. There you were. Yes, of course. Someone unconnected to Maman, someone whom Lukin would not even know to look for, let alone be able to find. Until now? But how had he known –

The Avengers. Natasha herself. Lukin was no fool. Where one Widow had survived, others probably would have too. Put that together with the assets in Siberia, and you had more than enough precedent to go on. And… if Pierce had honoured his deal with Maman all those years Natasha had sat in the Triskelion under his very nose… but Pierce was dead now, and Lukin had free reign. In addition to which, if Ross had him by the balls, he was desperate: a bad combination.

“How do we find them?” Bucky was losing patience, his tone grown sharp.

“I have a number,” Masha said. “That’s all.”

+++

“I’m feeling more manipulated than ever,” Bucky said when they were back in the car. Steve had picked the thing up in Germany somewhere – at least, it had German plates – and Natasha was driving. She was too jittery to sit quietly in the back while someone else took charge. The streetlights flashed across the dashboard, light then dark, light then dark, the streets quiet and deserted. They were taking the back way, past apartment blocks and shuttered shops, most of the late-night traffic humming along busier roads in the distance, intending to re-join the motorway somewhere outside the city. Steve was in the back seat, sprawling all over the place, one elbow on the back of the seat beside his head; he was rubbing at his beard again.

“By Markov?” he said. “But she’s protecting Natasha from Lukin.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Natasha said.

“Is Buck right about why she saved him?”

Natasha drummed her thumbs on the steering wheel. “Yes, probably, but don’t think she did that because she wants me to be happy.” She snorted. “My personal happiness is not Maman’s concern.”

“What other reason,” Steve said, impatient. There spoke a boy whose mother had adored him. Lucky little bastard. Natasha cut him off.

“Use your brains for five minutes, dearest. We’re not that different, you and I. The more power she has over people I love the more power she has over me.” Of course, when you laid it out like _that_ , it raised a question she should have thought of days ago. Natasha could have kicked herself. “Clint and Laura?”

Steve said, “You can make that call yourself.” He grinned at her in the rearview mirror.

“Uff,” Natasha said. “All right. Put it on.”

He balanced his phone on the armrest between the front seats, put it on speaker, and dialled. Bucky shifted, face impassive, but when Natasha caught his eye he winked at her.

“Steve!” said Clint’s voice, slightly tinny through the phone speakers. “You OK?”

“Uh, it’s Nat,” she said, like an idiot. The sound of his voice brought a hundred thousand memories crashing over her that, in the aftermath of regaining herself, had been overshadowed completely by her childhood, by Rose and Nikolai and Bucky, and now her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel as she remembered just how badly she’d missed Clint.

She’d always been good at putting her emotions away in boxes and ignoring them when – well, when they hurt her too much, basically.

“Oh I see,” said Clint. “You fuck off to parts un-fucking-known for two straight years and now you’re gonna waltz back in here stealing other people’s phones and think we’re still friends?”

“I’m sorry,” Natasha said quietly.

“I don’t need you to be fucking sorry,” said Clint. “I need you to haul ass over here and explain to your _nephews_ and your _goddaughter_ why you can send ‘em Christmas presents from Novosibirsk and postcards from Peru but they haven’t seen you in twenty months.”

“I messed up,” Natasha said. “I’m sorry.”

Clint snorted. “You’re sorry. That’s great, Romanov. You know how much it hurt when Cap turned up on the Raft but not you?”

“The _Raft_!” Natasha slammed on the brakes so hard that Steve nearly fell off the seat – served him right for not wearing a seatbelt like sensible people – her voice rising to a yell that made Bucky wince. “What fucking Raft!”

“Uh,” said Steve.

“I am going to fucking murder you,” Natasha said. “Fuck. Jesus _fuck_.” She’d devolved back into Russian again. Her hands were shaking as she climbed out of the car. It had rained earlier, and the tarmac gleamed wetly in the street lights, silence all around her. The road was lined with parked cars, the apartment blocks towering black and blank-faced over her, a few lights on here and there, up up above her head. She put the phone on the roof of the car, slammed the driver’s door shut, and lit up. Neither of the guys made to follow her.

“The Raft,” she said again.

Clint said, “Yeah.” He didn’t sound mollified. Rightly so. Natasha should never have let Tony provoke her into leaving like that, she should never have trusted him to do what was right for any part of her family. Suddenly her mother’s brisk voice rose to the fore: _you should have killed him after Sokovia and saved yourself the trouble_.

Maman never had tolerated mistakes very well.

“Tony –?” she said.

“He said he didn’t know.”

“The _fuck_ he didn’t! He made sure to fuck me over so I couldn’t stop it –”

“That – that’s not true.” Clint was sharp, the way he was with the children when they said something unfair or untrue, and she heard the wobble in his voice, realised that he fell back on that attitude because he was so surprised by her, by the venom in her voice. It made her ashamed, but only very distantly. “He’s a fuck-up, and right now I hate him, but he’s not malicious. He doesn’t have the brains, for a start.”

“He beat James half to _death_ ,” Natasha said, breathing hard. “Oh my god.”

“ _James_?”

“Bucky. My Soldier.”

“Your –” Clint was silent for long long moments. Then he said, “Nat, what the hell is going on? Let me help.”

“ _No_ ,” Natasha said. “No, god no. She’ll kill you. That’s why I’m calling. She’ll put a gun to the heads of anyone I love.”

“Who’s _she_?”

Natasha groaned. “Clint, just. Promise me you guys are safe, and that you’ll be careful. I’ll tell you when it’s over. I’ll come when it’s over.”

Stubborn, angry silence. Then: “You leave it too long, I’m coming for you.”

That warmed her all over. “I won’t.”

Back in the car Bucky was watching her; Steve was frowning at his own hands, and looked up when she handed him his phone back.

“All right?” Bucky said quietly.

“You knew?”

“T’Challa told us when we got to Wakanda.”

“I am going to gut you both.” Natasha pounded her fist on the steering wheel. God she’d fucked up. She’d completely and utterly fucked up. The Raft, for fuck’s sake. And she – she had walked away, like an idiot. She’d been trying to protect everyone at once, and it had all spiralled out of her control and made everything worse, and then she had turned her back and let them deal with the fallout on their own. She should have known better. She should have done better. “I can’t leave you alone for _ten minutes_.”

“That’s what I said,” Bucky said. Steve looked upset.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Somehow hearing him apologise for her mistakes infuriated her. “Oh don’t apologise to me. I’m not the one who’s dumb enough to go running round the world on the say-so of a walking talking propaganda poster.” Bucky put his elbow on the car door and covered his face with his hand to try to hide his smile; Steve flinched, but Natasha wasn’t done. “I mean, what would have happened if you’d died up there, Steve? You think Tony gives a flying fuck about anything other than himself?”

“Yes,” said Steve, nettled. “Yes, actually, I do.”

“You’re an _idiot_.” She was breathless with fury, shaking with it, the words tearing out of her in a torrent she couldn’t stop. There were no angles to play here and no contingencies to keep open: there was nobody in this car but her family, and she was damn well going to fight with them if she wanted to.

“You’re being vindictive and unfair,” Steve snapped. “I screwed up in Siberia, _me_ –”

“This isn’t about Siberia! This is about the fact that Tony _never changes_ –”

“And you _do_ , Agent Romanov? Fucked off and gone dark to lick whatever wounds you think you got in private while the people who love you –”

“Oh, don’t you fucking talk to me about trust after the crap you pulled!” She twisted round in the seat to yell at him properly, aware her face was flushed, watching his own colour rise. Steve was furious too. He was as angry with her now as he’d been with Bucky in Stalingrad, nothing held back at all.

“Don’t start that again! Was I supposed to drag you through the mud with me after everything you’d been through?”

The fucking _cheek_. She wanted to throttle him. “Oh, but you can drag everyone else, is that who you can drag?”

“ _They don’t fucking_ –”

Matter.

The silence in the car was ringing. Natasha’s mouth hung open. Steve choked himself off, red-faced, and fell back against the seat. He crossed his arms over his chest and shoved his clenched fists into his armpits, his face turned away, throat working as he swallowed. It wasn’t true, of course: the others mattered to him very much. And yet, on some level, it was perfectly true. Steve could wall off his emotions and lock them away from the rest of his brain as easily as Natasha herself. Bucky had punched right through that like a panzer tank through a brick wall, and Steve had thrown away everything he was and everything he cared about in the service of one single goal without a second’s hesitation.

Everything, apparently, except Natasha, crap though he’d been at showing it. _You know I can’t_. The look on his face in that hangar. _I would now. Because that’s what you and I do_. She put her head in her hands; someone else might have wept. Steve was breathing hard.

Long long minutes later, Bucky said, “Are we really gonna keep having this argument every few days like the horses on the carousel come back around?”

“It kind of looks like we are, yeah,” Natasha said bitterly.

“Every damn thing in the world that matters to me is in this car,” Steve said defiantly. “That’s the truth.” And then, when Natasha’s shoulders shook, he added more softly, “I guess I never change either.”

“I hate you,” Natasha said dully. “Oh hell, I should have let Lukin yank my brains out in Rio and turn me over to Ross. At least then I wouldn’t have to think.”

“Don’t say that,” Bucky said quietly.

“Fuck off,” she said without heat. “You –”

He laughed at her. “Every damn thing in the world that matters to me is in this car.”

“Oh, hell!” Natasha said angrily, and started to cry.

At first it was just pathetic sniffling, but she couldn’t make herself stop no matter how she tried: everything was such a tangled mess, and no matter where she turned she appeared to be letting someone she cared for down very badly, and really life had been so much easier before Maman had forced her into the Procrustean bed of Natasha Romanova’s made-up life. Kill who she was told to kill and train who she was told to train and never be sure of anything, ever, not even her own name, and not remember Grand-mère kissing her good-bye or Nikolai’s agonised death-rattle or how perfect Rose had been, every finger and toe and eyelash, except that her heart would not beat and her lungs would not breathe –

At some point Steve pulled her out of the car again, and she stood in the middle of a rainy Kiev street at three in the morning and sobbed, first into Steve’s shirt and then into Bucky’s, the angry, upset tears she’d been swallowing back since she was ten years old, until, at last, at long long last, she choked out, “She gave me the enhancements and they killed my Rose,” and after that there was nothing but her grief left in her.

 

 

**III.**

It was an unobtrusive little pub in a northern borough of London, rather old, and not very well kept from the outside. Inside it was clean and bright, the chairs on the tables and the wooden floor still damp where it had been mopped; the barmaid, a girl seeming a couple years younger than Natalia, her dark red hair pinned into a messy knot, was putting freshly washed glasses away and humming to herself.

“Sorry, darling, we’re closed,” she said, crisp Queen’s English accent blurring at the edges into something more working-class. “Call you a cab if you like?”

“Thanks,” Bucky said, “but that’s not necessary.”

She looked up. Blue eyes, bordering on grey; he leaned on the bar and smiled at her. He couldn’t quite bring himself to think of her by the name Irina had apparently given her, not without knowing if it was her own or not. It seemed like an imposition. The glass rattled when she put it down, staring at him, but when she spoke her voice was steady and her accent flawlessly American. “I heard you’d not survived Siberia.”

“I very nearly didn’t.”

“Well, congratulations.” Not at _all_ sarcastic. She propped her fist on her hip. “What do you want from me, Soldier?”

“Masha pointed us to you –”

“Irina’s lapdog? How charming.”

“Lukin has sold General Ross the assets. The girls.”

Her expression didn’t change, but she let out a controlled breath, and he saw that her left hand was twitching nervously. “And you’re here out of the goodness of your heart to rescue me?”

“I don’t remember you,” Bucky said. “You slipped them long before they found a safe use for me; I admire that. But of all those girls you hid, I trained over half of ‘em. I’d like to pay that debt. And I think, if you agreed to help Irina hide them from Karpov, that you care too.”

But that had been the wrong thing to say. She mocked him bitterly. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? The model runaway, growing a conscience, helping all her fellow-sufferers.”

He blinked. “Then why?”

“Irina found me,” she said. She was still angry, all these years later; she wanted to get it off her chest, to throw the information at someone who would understand it. Bucky held still as the words poured out of her in an angry torrent, her face flushed and twisted with the effort of not shouting. “I don’t know who she tortured it out of. Of course, with SHIELD being Hydra all along, she probably just put in a request for information with the right department. And she walked in to my apartment, and looked me up and down, and spoke.” She spread her hands wide in an expansive gesture. “Half a century, and all the bitch had to do was snap her fingers at me. Like a dog.” The hatred and the self-loathing dripped from her voice.

“I know how that feels,” Bucky said quietly, trying not to show the pity twisting in his chest. She wouldn’t like that, not at all. The Widows had not had trigger words implanted, as a rule. There wasn’t any need – raised from childhood in the rooms, they had no wipes to break, no identities to recover. If she had had them, perhaps Tasha had too, before the serum. But then Irina’s actions in Rio made no sense. Unless, as Bucky had suspected for a while now, it was imperative for whatever reason that she appear uninvolved… did Lukin think she was dead? That might explain it. Might.

“Yes. I suppose you would. And now you’ve led them neatly here; thanks for that! They don’t need a chair for either of us. They don’t need thumbscrews, or threats. They just need to be within earshot. Nothing ever changes for us, you know.” She turned away from him, stacking the glasses; closed the dishwasher, and threw the damp dishtowel into a small basket with several others, waiting to be washed.

Bucky studied her in silence, leaning on the bar. She moved quick and sure, slender but without much muscle tone – she had not, he thought, kept up training, or not as much as she could have. How long had she been bouncing around the world like this, never aging, never able to settle, waiting for that door to open again, those same words to be spoken? It had ground him down, that life, hour by hour and day by day, the fear and the monotony and the endless repeated assurances to his own reflection that this was the safest option he had, and he’d only done it for two years. _It always ends in a fight_ …

Finally he reached into his pocket and put the little vial on the bar. When he flicked it it rolled towards her, the noise very loud in the silent pub. She stared at it.

“Everything’s changed,” he said. “The serum wipes the triggers out.”

“What?” She was breathless, very pale.

“Factory settings.” He gestured at himself.

“The – the super-soldier serum?”

“Howard Stark’s new and improved version.”

“The only thing he ever knew how to make was a mess,” she said, but the sarcasm came on automatic, defensive.

“It _works_ ,” Bucky said quietly. One day maybe he’d be able to talk about Howard without seeing the way he’d died under Bucky’s own hands, but not today.

She raised her eyes to his. “And what do you want in return?”

“Nothing,” Bucky said.

That got him derision. Natalia might have bargained with her – it went against her instincts to trust another asset – but after Irina the only way the girl would trust them was if they asked nothing of her, and Bucky always preferred trust to acquiescence.

“Nothing at all.” He straightened up and made to leave. “I’d like to pay my debts. If you’re the only one who knows where the girls are, then the only way to do that is to keep you alive and out of Lukin’s hands. If you have the serum, you’re pretty much safe. Thus: debts paid.”

“Simplistic.” She was suspicious.

“Eh, you know.”

“And you’re now going to vanish off into the sunset…”

“Maybe open a pub someplace.” He grinned.

She rolled her eyes. “Have fun never aging.”

Bucky laughed. “Yeah, that’s gonna be weird.” He glanced over at the doors; Steve and Natasha were waiting in the car, and they still had to find a place to stay, lay their plans for Lukin.

“Lukin?” she asked.

“We’ll find a way to deal with him. I promise.”

She nodded slowly. “But he’s after you.”

Bucky said, “I’m not sure even he knows what he’s after.”

She could tell he didn’t want to tell her everything. Curiosity and hatred of Lukin and Irina warred with her desire to stay safely out of the way of whatever was coming; it was, Bucky decided, a good moment to leave.

“Good luck.” He turned to go, smiling a little; when he was at the doors she called after him.

“Barnes?”

Something in him thrilled to hear a total stranger call him by his own true name again. It made him giddy – he bit hard into the inside of his cheek, trying not to whoop.

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

He hadn’t expected that, he had to admit. In truth the whole conversation had gone easier than he’d expected. Bucky shrugged, smiling. “You’re welcome.”

Outside a lovely London fog shrouded the car and dampened his hair and coat; he climbed into the back with an air of relief.

“Found a place to sleep yet?”

“Half a dozen,” said Steve. “Natasha won’t let me book anything.”

“Wait,” Natasha said quietly. “She’ll come.”

“Uh-huh.” Bucky and Steve exchanged a look. The lights went out in the pub windows; then the door opened, and she walked out and locked it, her collar turned up around her face. For a moment she paused on the sidewalk. Then, mouth set, she strode across the road and opened the car door, climbing into the passenger seat. When she looked up and saw Natasha she paused, one foot still out of the car, her hand on the door.

Natasha smiled at her. The Widow’s face hardened, as if she were saying, challenge accepted, and she climbed into the car all the way and slammed the door.

“Glad you’re OK,” Natasha said.

“Spare me,” said the Widow. “If I’d known _you_ were in on it…” She divided up a glower between Bucky and Natasha.

“Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist,” Natasha said. “You can’t go around being resentful for _ever_.”

“I object to you because you’re not trustworthy, not out of pettiness.”

Steve stirred; Bucky put a hand on his knee, and he set his mouth stubbornly but didn’t speak. Natasha said calmly, “I don’t claim to be. Trust in my own self-interest, at least.”

“Yes,” said the Widow. “I suppose we all know how to do that.” She sighed. “So you remember, and you’re _still_ allying yourself with Rogers? It is Rogers, isn’t it?” Craning her head round the seat to look at Steve.

“It is,” he said.

“What difference does it make to you what I do with myself?” Natasha sounded annoyed; Bucky guessed she was curious.

“None – but it was _your_ theatrics that drew Lukin’s attention to us after all these years.”

That hit home. Bucky shifted in his seat – Steve’s turn to grip his knee. This was Natalia’s play. The car was stuffy and humid with damp coats and the palpable tension between the two women, but he wasn’t expecting violence. If anything, it reminded him of Sunday dinners after Becca and Emily had had an argument. 

“If I had remembered I had anything to be careful of, I would have been,” Natasha said. “How long have you been watching me on the ten o’clock news every other week and keeping this information to yourself?”

The Widow said, “You are not my responsibility.”

“No. But if you were that concerned about being found you would have dealt with me after New York, one way or the other.”

Angry breath. “I don’t –”

“Do that anymore?” Natasha was mocking her now. “How noble. I’m glad you had the chance to choose.”

The Widow made a funny noise – bitter and self-mocking. Then she said, “Yes. Call me Tatiana. How does the serum work?”

+++

Tatiana lived in the basement apartment of a house in Earl’s Court; it wasn’t big, but they managed fine. Steve took the armchair, and Natalia tucked herself into Bucky’s arms on the couch. Tatiana locked herself into her bedroom with the serum and a syringe and a bottle of water, leaving them the keys to her place on the coffee table.

She hadn’t hesitated for a heartbeat. Apparently, once she made up her mind to a thing, she went through with it at once. Well, or she wanted it over with before she got cold feet and changed her mind. Either way, they were here for about twelve hours, and made themselves accordingly comfortable.

There were a few shops near the tube station; sometime in the late morning Bucky slipped out and went for food, gathering up sandwiches and juice and a pile of ready meals – he couldn’t be bothered to cook. And after a moment he added beer to that tally, suddenly homesick for the taste of a careless, comfortable evening with his best friend and his girl. There. Perfect.

“I would’ve come,” Natalia said when he got back, smiling at him.

Bucky blinked. Then he said, “Old habits, I guess.” He’d always done the food shopping because Steve had so often been so stubborn about not wanting to spend Bucky’s money; it had been easier to present him with a _fait accompli_ than argue about it in advance, especially when half the food came from his parents’ store anyway. “How’s Tatiana?”

“Still out. It’ll be another few hours yet, I’m guessing.”

He nodded. Steve was in the front room, texting people Bucky thought. He cracked open a bottle of soda and watched Natasha fish out potato chips from the shopping bag; she tore them open and offered him the bag first.

There was no point beating around the bush, he decided. “Thanks. Hey – you OK?”

She rolled her eyes, still smiling. “You mean, because of my hysterical breakdown in Kiev?”

“Far from hysterical.” But frightening, it had to be said. She’d been so silent after. They had been halfway to Calais before she had smiled again, cracked a quiet joke, as if that explosion of temper and then the torrent of weeping that had followed it had drained her completely, left her exhausted. Her _daughter_. God. Bucky had been biting his tongue the whole way, angry with his own inability to help her, upset that the only thing he could do was hold her and promise her she wasn’t alone…

_You like being needed_ , Steve muttered in the back of his mind. Bucky ignored him. He needed her back: it all evened out.

Natalia made a face. “I’m bad at feelings.”

Bucky rolled his eyes and stole another potato chip.

“You know what I mean. It’s a lot to sort out. It feels like there are two different people in here.” He didn’t know how the hell she managed to look so attractively contemplative while munching potato chips, a furrow between her eyebrows, her eyes far away.

“And now you’ve just turned into a third one?” Bucky said. “Yeah. Before Germany, whenever something else would come back to me, it would be… it would go in Bucky’s side of my head or the Soldier’s. And some days I wasn’t all that sure that Bucky was real.” He sighed. “I wanted him to be, though.”

Natalia smiled at him. “He was. He is.”

He smiled back. “Yeah. So’s she, you know. Romanov.”

“It frustrates me that I know for a fact that I didn’t have her childhood, but I do have all her issues about it. _All_ of them.” She sighed, her mouth pulling into a thoughtful little pout.

“But the good things too. Barton. Steve.”

Her eyes flicked over him, thoughtful; he smiled.

“I think the only part of him I’m going to keep is you.”

“Easy now,” Natalia said, gesturing with a potato chip. “They didn’t pour a whole new person into _your_ head. Every part of him that I loved was present and correct in 1944, and still is.”

Bucky put his hands on the counter at either side of his hips, speechless. He couldn’t stop looking at her, not ever. After a few moments he shut his eyes and shook his head. “Screw you, Romanov,” he said lovingly. “I fell for you in Rostov for all the exact same reasons I did in 1953.”

She put the potato chips down very abruptly and turned away from him to fetch herself a glass of water, and he laughed at her when she wiped her eyes.

“Go fall off a train, Barnes,” she said wetly. “Besides, it was fifty-two.”

“The earlier the better.”

That made her laugh; she had to put the glass down, shaking her head. “Oh you’re –”

“Handsome and charming in whatever edition, according to you.”

“Edition?” Steve, in the kitchen doorway with his eyes glued to his phone screen – he was probably reading a book – while Natasha laughed.

Bucky was watching her, too busy thinking about her smile and her sly humour and her kindness, to really think it through when he said, “Oh, my identity issues.”

“Oh, come _on_ ,” said Steve, looking up.

Coming from Steve, it made Bucky angry. He’d done the same thing in the Quinjet – _it wasn’t you_ , as if it were that easy. Natalia understood – from her it was reassurance – from Steve it was a refusal to fucking well listen. “Oh _you_ know best if I’m the same person or not, do you?”

Steve stared at him. “Buck,” he said. “You just walked out the other side of seventy years of hell in a three-piece suit with a pretty redhead on your arm who adores you and you think you’re not the same _person_? Gimme a break.”

And so scoffing he took an apple off the table and went back into the living room.

“Darling,” Natalia said, slinking over to Bucky to put her fingers on his chin. “You’ll catch flies.”

Bucky clicked his teeth together. Natalia rubbed her thumb over his mouth.

“You’re very cute when you’re indignant.” She was trying not to laugh at him. He could taste the potato chip salt on her skin; her smile was tip-tilted impishly. Bucky narrowed his eyes at her. She was trying to distract him – probably herself as well – and by god it was working. Lazily, he parted his lips and sucked her thumb into his mouth, licking the salt off, rubbing his tongue over the pad.

Natalia swallowed hard. “Tell me about the other pretty redheads,” she said wickedly.

“How about no.”

“You’re not fun.”

“You trying to tell me something?”

“Get your mind out of the gutter,” she said, mock-sternly.

“My love,” he murmured. “So you adore me, huh?”

“You should be so lucky.” She sniffed.

“Because I pretty much worship the ground you walk on.”

He would never get tired of seeing her blush. It was delightful. He cupped her face in his hands and pulled her in, and she went up on tiptoes to kiss him, her arms winding around his neck. They hadn’t had sex since Stalingrad… lovely to hold her close again and kiss her soft hot mouth, lose himself in the smell and taste and feel of her. Had they ever had the chance to stand in a room somewhere and make out like adolescents without caring if they were found or not? Never. She was gripping him tight, her shoulders curved in, her body pressed against him. Bucky was never going to let go of her again.

_Gimme a break_. Only Steve could do dismissive quite that well. Bucky grinned against Natasha’s mouth, and when she parted her lips further he traced the pout of the lower one with his tongue, the soft inside, her teeth; she sucked on his tongue, making him shiver. Lovely. He slid his left hand down to her ass and groped her leisurely; she squirmed against him, laughing, and returned the favour.  

This was gonna be fun.

+++

By the time Tatiana reappeared it was early evening. Bucky and Natasha were dozing on the couch, curled up in one another’s arms again. Steve, in contrast, had not been able to settle at all, though his head was heavy and he kept yawning. He remembered this restless buzzing in his blood from working at SHIELD: if there was one thing spies and snipers had in common it was their patience. The ability to lay low and wait for the right moment to strike was something Steve had always lacked. He preferred to make his own moments, as a rule…

Wandering aimlessly round the kitchen, poking at the food Bucky had brought with the half-hearted conviction that he should be eating something, despite not being hungry, he realised suddenly that this was the first time he’d been more or less alone with his thoughts since that first morning in Stalingrad.

Volgograd, sorry. On impulse he pulled a beer out of the fridge, fished Bucky’s cigarettes out of his jacket – Lucky Strikes, as always – and escaped out the front door to sit on the steps and smoke and think. He hadn’t lit up this often since the war – he hadn’t smoked this much during the war, but the absent-minded way Bucky had been smoking since Stalingrad brought it out in him. Steve had never seen Natasha smoke before. Dernier had smoked Gauloises too...

Of course, there were a lot of things Steve had never seen Natasha do before – touch someone so much, kiss them, hug them so easily, smile so widely. Cry. That had been _awful_. Steve had spent years wishing he could snap his fingers and make Natasha Romanov’s shiny Teflon masks fall off, show him the flesh and blood woman underneath, and when she’d chosen to put them aside and let him see he’d been honoured and grateful – determined to be worthy of that trust, of her. But he had never imagined that anything he could say or do would make her turn on a dime like that and completely come apart.  

That was arrogant too. 1917, Christ. And Markov her _mother_. And she’d remembered none of this before taking the serum: she was mourning her husband and her little girl all over again… Steve looked left to the curtained windows of Tatiana’s front room, aching for her, wishing he could go in there and hold her and make it right. Well, he couldn’t fix it, but he could do whatever it took to keep her safe, to help her however she needed him to, just as for Bucky.

Bucky. How the hell those two had happened was utterly beyond Steve, given the situation they’d been in. But how typical of Bucky to find a way out, and typical of Natasha to look at what Hydra had forced him to become and see the man he really was underneath. It made Steve smile. They were perfect for each other. Bucky had a photo of Nat in his wallet – perfectly done up on some Paris street back home, way out of his league, but that laugh was everything Bucky Barnes fell head over heels for encapsulated. And now, entirely himself again –

Steve swigged his beer, grinning, and lit up another in lieu of jumping up and down and whooping for joy. Something warm as summer sunshine and fizzy as champagne had been using his stomach for a trampoline for days, ever since – since the fight. That had been it, the end, game over, home run made. _Your Mom’s name was Sarah_ , all soft and defeated, had made him want to cry; the newspapers he’d always tried to hide from Buck, too proud to admit to them, had been worse; _didn’t I tell you you liked getting punched_ had been like being punched.

_There you are_. And for the first time in decades, in the face of that taunting and that triumph and that anger, Steve had thought, yeah. Here I am. He laughed, shifting on the uncomfortable step, his ass numb from the cold and the unyielding concrete; a breeze was coming up, and the streetlights were on, but he wasn’t ready to move just yet. The crackle of the cigarette paper burning seemed very loud, despite the noise of the pub down the road, the cars moving past, people hurrying along the sidewalks. _Carter bet me a bottle of black market whiskey I couldn’t get you to keep it_. Steve doubted that. Steve doubted it very much. But the idea was – well, it was perfect.

Was Bucky different? That tease – the way he’d torn Steve a new one in Stalingrad – suggested not, and anyway everything in Steve rebelled against any suggestion to the contrary: if Buck never came back, whole and himself, Hydra had won, and that was insupportable.  

But that wasn’t Steve’s call to make, was it. Maybe it was enough of a victory that Bucky was alive at all. Maybe the fact that he had looked at Steve and said, _I don’t ever want to kill anyone else_ , was the best and most comprehensive victory possible, memory or no memory… Steve sighed, watching the smoke spiral up from the stub of the cigarette; then he lit yet another, unwilling to go back inside just yet. The nicotine affected him about as much as the beer did, which was, not at all; it took a lot to give Steve the kind of flash he remembered from before the war, when cigarettes had burned in his throat and nose and made him wobbly and light-headed.

Bucky was quiet, but he’d been quiet after Azzano. He was wary, but he’d been wary after Azzano. He was sharp and a bit ruthless, with no patience for excuses, justifications – perhaps he was more blunt about it now, but he’d always been that way, really. _Cause you got nothing to prove_. Yeah. And he remembered everything, Steve was sure. The man he’d been in Bucharest, Berlin – haunted and hunted and alone – would not, Steve guessed, have risked their relationship by taunting him. Bucky Barnes had known since he was four years old that nothing he or Steve ever said to one another would break them apart.

It was the same with Natasha. God, he’d fucked up in Germany. She’d told him, told him explicitly, _I’m trying to protect you_ , and he’d ignored it and her, had reached out to Sharon instead – Sharon whom he liked, but was she Nat? No. Nothing close to it. No wonder she’d gone dark, after whatever Tony had said to her. Something hurtful, for it to make her distrust him so completely. Steve had no right to be angry about that. It was none of his business – he had hurt her too. But it was Tony all over to lash out in haste and repent at leisure, and if Nat were willing – but he obviously still hadn’t apologised, had he, if she was still so angry at him, and –

Fuck it all. Steve’s head was spinning. He finished his beer in two long swallows and flattened the can, the angry crumpling noise it made very satisfying indeed. It didn’t matter. He’d been twisting himself up in what-ifs and might-have-beens for months, half-hoping, half-fearing Natasha would call, T’Challa would call, Tony would call – it didn’t matter now.

The only thing that mattered was that he had both of them back, these two people he loved more than anything. The only thing. Steve sighed. He was about to stand up to fetch himself another beer when the front door opened.

Tatiana was pale, bruises under her eyes; she’d wrapped herself in a heavy cardigan, her hair tied in a messy pony tail, and she passed Steve a second beer and took herself a cigarette when he offered one without speaking. Only when she’d lit up, sighing, did she thank him.

“You’re welcome,” said Steve. “Thank you for the hospitality.”

She smiled, thin-lipped. “I think I’m the one with the debts here. If this works…”

“Is there a way you can test it?”

Tatiana shrugged. “I remember the words.”

Steve nodded. “Here’s to hoping.” He held up the beer can; she toasted him, after a second, unsmiling. “You should eat – Bucky got food.”

“How domestic.” Now she looked amused. “Do you mother all the lost murderesses you come across?”

“I don’t,” Steve started, and then, too honest not to, said, “Wanda will probably tell you that I do, actually.”

He was kind of delighted when she laughed helplessly. “I was always surprised to see you work with Romanov,” she admitted.

“It was tough at first.” Steve watched her thoughtfully. Her hair was greasy, but in this rather dull little concrete corner of the world it was very bright and very red. It distracted you from the lines of her face, her blue eyes, but the more he looked at her the more sure he was that he’d seen her somewhere before. “I got the impression you didn’t like each other.”

Tatiana sighed out a cloud of smoke and shook her head. “It’s – well, looking back on it from my ancient years” – Steve grinned – “it’s pretty stupid. You say Irina’s out and about?”

“Not met her yet, but yes.”

“You know that Natalia…”

“Is her daughter, yes.”

“I was her favourite,” Tatiana said, and even now, even after everything, there was a faded note of pride in her voice. “In the rooms. I was the best. I killed and maimed and tore myself to pieces because she told me to; I made myself a monster because she ordered it, and when she praised me I was proud. I was the best, most precocious, most skilled, most loyal asset in the programme.”

Steve shook his head, not understanding. Tatiana grinned.

“Until the war started, and Natalia joined the Army and was an intelligence officer and a sniper, and suddenly it was all, oh, my daughter Natalia –”

“Ohhhh,” said Steve. “You mean – she’s older than you, and better-looking, and smarter, and knows how to do everything you don’t and makes it look easy…”

Tatiana’s eyebrows climbed; her jaw dropped a little – Steve had known Natasha for long enough that he could tell she was doing it deliberately, a carefully-calculated expression to set him at ease and make her seem ordinary, normal. She tipped her head towards the living room window, where Bucky and Natasha were – presumably – still dozing. “Oh, hidden resentments.”

“It’s not a foothold,” said Steve, amused.

Tatiana pursed her lips around her cigarette. “No?”

“No.” He sipped his beer and smiled at her. They were silent then, smoking and drinking and listening to the evening noises of London growing louder in the streets around them: front doors opening, people calling out, cars starting, a dog barking in a back yard.

At last she said, “What about Lukin?”

Steve grimaced. “There’s no plan yet, if that’s what you mean. If he’s doing deals with Ross…”

“Why not just kill him?”

He laughed shortly. “Go ahead. I won’t stop you.” He wasn’t sure he was lying. The thought that the people who had visited decades of torture on Bucky and Natasha were still alive out there, unpunished, even protected, made him furious.

He’d brought her up short. Steve grinned, mirthless. “Read too many comic books, have you? Stupid thing to do.”

He made his tone dismissive, condescending; it stung her into anger, and – tired and in pain as she probably was – into indiscretion. “Met too many of your friends,” she retorted.

Hah.

“You were at her funeral. In the back pew.”  

Tatiana wouldn’t look at him. Silence again: she stabbed her cigarette out and held out her hand, asking for another. He handed her pack and lighter. Her hands were shaking – beer, nicotine, physical exhaustion. Her thumb slipped on the lighter once, twice; she dropped her hands, the cigarette dangling from her mouth, and finally said, “You know what really makes me angry? About Irina?”

Steve shook his head. He wanted to stand up and light the cigarette for her, but he didn’t quite dare.

“Barnes was right. In the pub. She didn’t need the trigger words. I would have helped her save those girls. I would have done whatever it took, for all of them, so that they could all have _this_.” Sardonically, she gestured at the grey little corner, the trash bin, the railings over their heads, the rather dull street beyond, the millions upon millions of people in London who had never dreamed a life like hers, or Steve’s. Bitter laugh; this time, she managed to light the cigarette. “I really hate being made to take responsibility for things. Peggy used to do it all the time.”

“She was good at that.” Steve tapped his fingers against his beer can, listening to the metallic, hollow pattern of noise.

Tatiana said, “Quit that. It’s going right through my head.”

“Sorry.”

She shrugged. “If you want Lukin eliminated, I volunteer.”

Steve sighed. “We’re not there yet.”

“You will be soon.” Tatiana grinned viciously. “We’ll see. Right. I need a shower. If you feel like making dinner, be my guest.” She smoked the cigarette down with quick impatient drags, stubbed it out and went inside. Steve stayed put; there was movement inside the house, voices. He pulled his phone out thoughtfully and opened the browser, wondering what keywords to use to search the old SHIELD files for Peggy’s mission reports about former KGB assassins – if they had ever been digitised. “Black Widow” would probably pull up nothing but Natasha’s files… Well, it was worth a try.

+++

Amazing that they’d slept half the afternoon again. Bucky didn’t need much sleep, generally, but here he was, sleeping days away in Stalingrad, dozing in the car and on strange assassin’s couches. _I’m safe_ , he thought idly, _that’s the problem_. Sleep still held horrors, but he was no longer helpless in the face of them; he could catalogue and deal with them, had context for all the memories that flashed up in his dreams. The three small girls he saw himself carrying around were his sisters; he recognised the houses and the streets and the messy book-strewn bedroom that had haunted him, no longer had to guess that the older woman with her hair in a knot and her hands rough with work might be his mother, but knew it for a fact.

Natasha had decided she was hungry, and was examining the food he’d bought earlier. Bucky kissed her absently, liberated two beers from the fridge, and went to find Steve.

“Hey.” The step was narrow for two big men, so they were pressed all against each other when Bucky sat down, pushing at Steve to make him move over. They squabbled over it like kids, grinning.

“Sleep well?”

“Better than in a long time,” Bucky said. “You?”

Steve shrugged. “Keyed up.”

“No patience,” Bucky teased. “That’s your problem.”

“I know, I know. Tatiana seems all right,” he added.

“We’ll see,” Bucky said thoughtfully. “Right now we’re her best option, but if that changes…”

“Cynic.” Steve handed him his phone; Bucky frowned, realising he was looking at old SHIELD files Steve had downloaded off the internet platform the newspapers had set up after DC.

“Hmm.” He scrolled through a couple reports, recognising Carter’s handwriting, then Howard’s – that gave him a jolt.

“She was at Peggy’s funeral,” Steve said quietly. “I don’t think her best option’s going to change in a hurry.”

“No, maybe not.” Bucky looked at him. It still gave him a jolt sometimes, this new solidity of Steve, the broad shoulders, the heat of the body against his own. But there had been enough time, during the war, for it to become familiar, comforting. They had sat like this, in infinitely less hospitable places, talking about nothing and teasing each other, countless times… déjà vu struck Bucky then, or maybe just the certainty of having come home, warm and heavy in his chest. He leaned against Steve’s shoulder, smiling. And the beard did suit him. Bucky couldn’t help wondering if Carter would have liked it. “Talk about coincidences.”

“Yeah. All these people chasing after the serum – even with the war barely over. It makes me think I could make a fortune selling pints of my blood, or my internal organs.” Steve pulled a face.

Bucky laughed. “A pretty big fortune, yeah.”

“Have you had any offers?” Steve looked amused.

“ _Offers_ is… not quite the word.”

“Oy vey,” Steve said. He sighed. “So you didn’t get a price list?”

“Nope,” Bucky said.

“Shame.”

“Man oughta know what his kidneys are worth,” Bucky agreed, straight-faced.

“Maybe they’d grow back,” Steve said. “Solve our money problems for a start.”

For a few seconds the implication of Steve’s words didn’t register. Then Bucky licked his lips, an awful suspicion tying knots in his gut. “What money problems?”

“Uh,” said Steve, staring at him. “We’re broke, Buck.”

Oh no. “How are we _broke_!”

“Whaddaya mean, how are we broke, where have you been all this time, we haven’t been this broke since they threw us out of the Rose and Crown over the darts game and the twenty-three shillings.” Steve peered at him confusedly.

Hah. Bucky had forgotten about that night, which was shameful: it had been a really good night. “You know, it’s seventy years later and I’m still not sure I know what shillings even are,” he said, briefly side-tracked. “Besides, we didn’t _know_ it was Monty’s second cousin twice removed.”

“He really should have mentioned that before he let us leave the house,” Steve agreed.

“Very irresponsible parenting all round. But, look, what did you _spend_ it on? Hookers and blow?” He thought about that for a second. “Please tell me you spent it on hookers and blow.”

“There weren’t any hookers and there isn’t any blow,” Steve said, exasperated. “ _There isn’t any money_.”

“But the ten mil,” Bucky said blankly.

Steve turned an absolutely fascinating rainbow of colours. “What ten million!” he burst out in a strangled shout.

“The ten million that I stole off Pierce before I left DC,” Bucky hissed, trying to keep his voice down, even though the street was deserted. “Jesus Mary and Joseph, you think I’m going on the run without any money at all? _Me_?”

“That was you. Of course it was you, why didn’t I know that was you, for god’s sake, what did you do with it?”

“The account details were in my _journals_ ,” Bucky snarled.

Steve looked taken aback. “I didn’t read those!”

“They were colour-coded, Steve! What did you need, a giant flashing vaudeville – Jesus fucking Christ, now Ross has probably got it. That’s great, Steve. That’s just _great_.”

“Seriously, you couldn’t have taken ten seconds to mention them before now?” said Steve. “Jesus. Ten _million_. Are you _serious_? Jesus, I need a drink.”

“Unbelievable,” Bucky said, disgusted.

“Colour-fucking-coded fucking diaries,” said Steve. “You’re such an _accountant_.”

“Red has always been the finance stuff,” said Bucky. “ _Always_. I could throttle you.”

“How was I supposed to know you remembered that?”

“I shoulda known you _wouldn’t_. If it looks organised it just doesn’t exist in Steve Rogers’ brain, oh no.”

“Oh, stow it,” said Steve. “I mean –”

“Ten _million_ ,” Bucky mourned. “I can’t believe you.” And then, because there was nothing else to be done about it, he started laughing. “What a fuck up!”

Steve sputtered indignantly, but the longer Bucky laughed the more amused he got, until finally they were both in stitches, hanging on to each other and whooping.

+++

Tony’s text was short and to the point: _Ross in Geneva for conference Lukin with him_. Natasha pursed her mouth; she’d been stabbing holes in the foil over the microwave dinner, and twirled the knife between her fingers as she thought about it. She had what Lukin wanted – if Tatiana could be persuaded to play along, a discreet recording device and a pair of handcuffs, and Lukin could be picked up at Tony’s leisure…

Safer to kill him, of course. But she’d promised Bucky.

She put the knife and her phone down and went to find the guys. Out in the hall she could hear them laughing through the front door, and smiled. When she opened the front door they were on the steps leading up to the street, pressed close together and prostrate with laughter. Their faces were completely changed – open, boyish, delighted. She could have looked at them all day.

“What’s so funny?”

“We’ve hit a snag,” Bucky said, cackling.

“What kind of a snag?”

“I need a couple of days to sell Steve’s kidneys.”

Natasha was lost. “That came out of nowhere!”

“We’re broke, you see.”

That made even less sense. “How’s that a snag?”

“Well,” Bucky explained, “I was hoping I would be able to keep you in the lifestyle to which you’d become accustomed.”

Natasha sniggered. “As a penniless ballet teacher in Rio? Don’t be silly.” She thought about it. “Unless it _bothers_ you that I have money.” Just because they weren’t in the Forties anymore didn’t mean that his ideas about money… he was a darling, but he’d worked for a living all his life, and had probably been brought up believing he’d have a family to look after one day, and –

 “Well no, but I’d hate to be the moocher when Steve’s kidneys are right here.” He poked at Steve in the general area of the organs in question, grinning.

“Fuck you, go sell your own,” Steve said, batting his hand away and dissolving into laughter again. “Oh my god. Never been in so much trouble for _not_ reading someone else’s diaries!”

Ohhh. Natasha hid a grin. “But what about Pierce’s ten million?” she said innocently.

“Steve spent it on hookers and blow,” Bucky said. Steve hit him in the shoulder, laughter subsiding into suppressed snickers, and Natasha laughed out loud.

“He hasn’t been near it,” she said.

“What,” Bucky said.

“It’s in the Caymans, I shuffled it over there right after Bucharest so you couldn’t make a break for it.”

Bucky’s jaw dropped. She had never seen him so surprised; his mouth made a near-perfect ‘o’. Then he poked Steve in the knee. “You hear that?” he said. “The Caymans. Right after Bucharest. This is the kind of example I leave you with for six straight years and _nothing_ do you learn.”

“I thought you knew,” Natasha said, laughing. “It was in the files. I moved it again after Leipzig of course, but I mean, the account details were in your journals, it wasn’t hard to find. I was too pissed off at you to send you the details. I figured if you wanted it you’d come find me.” She rolled her eyes at Steve.

For some reason this set them both off again, and she leaned against the wall and watched them wheeze and clutch each other, tempted to take a video of it – Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, falling over each other laughing at something she’d done. It made her go all gooey inside.

+++

In the end, Steve came with her to Geneva. Natasha needed a second pair of eyes – a sniper would be ideal – and her heart had nearly torn out of her chest when she’d seen the white resolve on Bucky’s face.

Steve had seen that expression too. He tapped his ballpoint on the table top and said, “I’ll do back up. I want a look at Lukin for myself.”

Bucky exhaled slowly. He nodded, but he didn’t speak.

She let Steve drive, because she thought he seemed twitchy, and settled into the passenger seat. After a while she toed her boots off and put her socked feet on the dash.

Steve heaved a sigh.

“Ah, memories,” Natasha said cheerily.

He laughed a little, that restrained, almost hidden little chuckle that was the most open expression of amusement she’d ever teased out of him, before today.

“Baaack in the saddle again.”

“I’m glad you didn’t stop at fifty year old Motown, I really am, but for the love of god, no Aerosmith.”

“Why not just give me a list of all the things I’m not allowed to listen to?”

“Because you’d turn it into a playlist and make the absolute worst song on there into your ringtone for me.”

Steve opened his mouth indignantly. After a second he said, “Actually yeah, I would,” and Natasha laughed.

“See!”

“Mmm,” said Steve. “A lot of things, these days.” He glanced over at her thoughtfully. “Ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“What _did_ Tony say to you?”

“Oh,” Natasha said. She frowned, watching the motorway whirl by in the darkness; they had missed the evening traffic by the simple expedient of waiting to leave until midnight, and would catch the first morning ferry from Dover. In the dim lights that raked over the car, the glow of the dashboard, she wriggled her toes thoughtfully. “He called me an imposter,” she said at last. “He accused me of having been working for you all along.”

Steve sucked in a breath.

Casually she added, “I think what really gets under my skin is the knowledge that if you’d come to me in Berlin instead of Sharon, I’d have done it.”

Steve didn’t hesitate: not for a second, not for a heartbeat. “No you wouldn’t have.”

The words hung in the air between them, a statement of unassailable fact, irrefutable as only Steve’s arrogance could make it. _I know what kind of person you are, and that isn’t it_.

Of all the things to bring her close to tears. Again. This was getting tiresome, having feelings.

Hell. Natasha stamped _that_ voice out. It sounded like Maman. “You know the thing that really makes me angry?” she said at last.

She couldn’t look at him, but she saw him shake his head out of the corner of her eye. “Tell me.”

“I’d have done it for Clint.”

Sudden explosive, “Hah!” Then he made a funny little choking noise, and took his hand off the wheel to grope for hers, lacing their fingers together tight. “Thanks,” he said, “for not saying me.”

Natasha snorted. “I love you, you stupid jerk, but I don’t love you that much.”

Just like that he started laughing – all choked up, admittedly, but it was a real laugh just the same, and Natasha turned in surprise and saw again the way it changed his face. She remembered Kiev then, and how angry he’d been with her... Triumphant, she thought, _Got you now, Rogers_. She squeezed his hand, wiping at her eyes with her sleeve.

“How about a friend,” said Steve. “I love you too, Romanov, you know that, right?”

She smiled, very slowly, when he turned to look at her. The beard rather suited him, but in combination with the lights overhead flashing over his face it made him look shadowed and ghostly in all the wrong ways. “I do now.”

He smiled back at her, ear to ear. “Yeah.”

+++

Lukin was surprised to see her. He hid it well, but Natasha crossed her legs at the knee and smiled at him, and he closed the hotel room door behind himself and said, “ _Vdova_.”

“Oh, let’s not beat around the bush, Comrade,” Natasha said. “You know my name.”

For a long moment he was quiet, watching her closely; his eyes ran over her from her boots to the hem of the dress, pushed up just enough to show the knives at her thigh, to the gun on the table and the coat beside it, her neatly-pinned hair, her careful make up.

“Commander Markova,” he said. “A pleasure.”

“As always,” Natasha said sweetly. “Have you seen my mother? Do give her my love.”

Lukin twitched, and Natasha grinned at him.

“You’re not here at her orders, then.”

“Please. I’m sick and tired of the pair of you.” She cocked her head to the side, wondering… “You’re lucky, you know, she usually kills her concubines when she’s done with them.”

Ahhh, she loved it when a guess came right. Lukin’s left hand clenched, though his face stayed expressionless. After a moment he undid and took off his coat, hanging it in the little hotel wardrobe, and came to sit opposite her at the other side of the tiny table. It wasn’t a very upmarket hotel – a simple chain place that catered to businessmen from across the globe; not exactly what Natasha recalled Lukin being used to. That must rankle. The gun was very black against the brightly-coloured tourist brochures promising fun times and good meals for all the family. Natasha tapped her finger on it.

“You want something,” Lukin said.

“ _You_ want something,” she shot back. “The assets.”

He shrugged. “I have not survived this long without knowing when to… tread carefully. General Ross has enough resources that I find it expedient to cooperate. For now.”

“Of course you do. Tell me. What exactly did you sell him?”

“All the assets I could retrieve.”

“And have you?”

His mouth thinned.

“No. She’s too smart for you. Few false trails, several leads that petered out in abandoned warehouses in the middle of nowhere? Yeah. But you narrowed it down in the end, didn’t you? Process of elimination.”

“Kirilova,” he explained. “Defected very early – ’47, ’48, I forget which. She had been one of the test subjects for the procedure that was later used on – Sergeant Barnes.” Natasha tilted her head again, but didn’t react, otherwise; Lukin flashed a vicious smile. “Supposedly because of that, Irina argued that her retrieval was not a priority; she could be brought back at any time. But of course she never was. A back-up plan, eh, like the gun you keep in your boot.”

“And have you found her?”

Lukin said, “Are you offering me her location?”

“Not exactly,” Natasha said.

+++

“How’d it go?” Bucky asked. They met down by the lakeshore, in a crowd of tourists in the middle of a sunny afternoon. Tatiana was hiding in the hotel room; Natasha was drinking coffee and reading a book two hundred yards away, and if Lukin’s men were worth what he was paying them they were at least aware that the serene amusement with which she’d gone through her day so far was entirely down to their own incompetence.

Some people’s idea of special ops training made Bucky want to put his head in his hands and cry.

“OK, I think,” Steve said. “Nat said some very unflattering things about all of us, and Lukin seemed happy to buy it…”

“Dumb shmuck,” Bucky said.

Steve laughed quietly. “She’ll have him hanging himself soon enough.”

“I know.” Bucky shifted; they were standing side by side and smoking – again – really, he should quit. It wasn’t going to give him cancer anymore, but all of a sudden irritation overtook him: why, oh why had he let himself develop a habit? It would –

But it wouldn’t. Ever again. What the hell. He lit another, feeling defiantly adolescent.

Steve touched his elbow. Bucky offered him the cigarettes, but Steve wasn’t after a smoke; he wanted to talk. Bucky faced him, eyebrows raised. The photoveils changed their faces, but, well, thirty years was a long time, and Steve was still Steve and Bucky was still Bucky, in spite of everything.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said gently.

“Yeah? Are you sure it’s a good idea for you to be here?” 

“Mmm.” Bucky sighed. “Maybe not. But I’m done hiding. If Stark wants Round Two, he can have it. Either way, I need to know.”

Steve scrunched his nose up thoughtfully, the way he’d used to do when they were boys. “All right,” he said at last. “But I –”

“Steve,” Bucky said.

“Yeah?”

“Quit worrying, will you.”

Steve laughed. “No promises.”

+++

“I appreciate your doing this,” Natasha said quietly.

Tatiana shifted in the passenger seat. It was a nice night, warm and breezy; the stars were out, and every now and then, when the road bent around a corner, the headlights of the car swept the surrounding fields and hedges and gave a hint of a hilly, grass-covered, peaceful sort of countryside. Sometimes they passed a field or two populated with cows, and the sound of the bells around their necks would break the silence in the car.

“Self-interest,” she said.

“Uh-huh.” For a little while they were quiet; the GPS screen was very bright in the darkened car. At last Tatiana stirred again.

“What if Stark doesn’t come through?”

Natasha shrugged. “Then he’ll have a lot of bodies to clean up in the morning and no evidence at all for Ross.”

Tatiana barked a laugh. “You could have killed Lukin and be done with it by now.”

“No,” Natasha said quietly. “I promised Bucky I wouldn’t make him a party to that.”

“Sentimental,” Tatiana said.

“Practical, too. Whom does suspicion fall on when the investigation into Lukin’s death or disappearance starts turning up all these unfortunate KGB connections? Why, his vengeful… former assets. They’re already criminals.”

“That’s true.”

Another handful of miles passed in silence. They were getting closer; nervousness swooped through Natasha’s stomach, a distant echo of a girl who’d hung her ballet shoes over a chair in her bedroom and pretended to herself that one day she would put the rifle down and put those shoes on again.

But only for a moment. Maman had only invented the details, after all.

Ten minutes away. Tatiana rubbed her hands together.

“She could have hauled me back in any time she wanted,” she said softly.

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t she? Seventy years is a longer con than even Irina Markova knows how to play.”

Natasha shrugged. “Honestly?”

“If you would be so kind.”

“She’s fond of you.”

Tatiana jerked. Natasha grinned unpleasantly.

“Maman never has straightforward motivations for anything she does. You’d better get used to it.”

“I don’t intend to ever lay eyes on her again.”

Natasha snorted. “My girl, when she’s done with you she’ll kill you. As long as you’re breathing, she isn’t.”

_Maman_. That made Tatiana jump as well. How dared she feel so hard-done-by when Maman had let her off the leash in 1946 and left her to live however she liked for seventy years? Argh. Natasha set her jaw, determined not to be petty. Well, petti _er_.

Five minutes. Four. Natasha drew a long breath. This was the end of it, right here: the last – oh, nonsense. Men like Lukin popped up like Coop’s whack-a-mole game. But it would be _an_ ending, at long last. Now they were twisting and turning along a road that snaked up a steep and thickly wooded hillside. Black and white markers lined the road at intervals, gleaming reflectively in the headlights. The middle of nowhere: halfway between one sleepy, forgotten town and the next. Natasha hoped Bucky and Steve weren’t too miserable out in the trees.

Lukin was waiting in the road, the headlights of his car on; atop the hood sat a dark shape which Natasha assumed was the cash. Contrary to arrangements, he wasn’t alone.

“General Ross,” she said, slamming the car door. “What an unpleasant surprise.”

Ross tilted his head. He was standing to the left and behind Lukin, and the gun pointed at the bastard’s head was very steady. “Agent Romanov,” he said, and glared when Lukin snorted. “I understand you have something for me.”

“Got impatient, did you?” Natasha said sweetly. “The Comrade not pulling his weight?”

Tatiana snorted.

“Watch your damn mouth,” said Ross. “I’ve got enough arrest warrants for you that nobody would ask many questions if you turned up dead.”

Natasha couldn’t help it: she laughed at him. Oh lord, these _children_. Even Lukin rolled his eyes. It threw Ross off his game entirely. You could see the muscles in his jaw twitching as he searched for words.

“The information,” he said roughly.

“Here.” Tatiana held up a bundle of papers in a plastic document holder, and for the first time Ross twitched; naked avarice blazed across his face.

“Bring it here,” he ordered, stretching out his free hand. It trembled with excitement. There was something about the greed on his face that turned Natasha’s stomach – something almost – almost sexual. Tatiana had seen it too, her mouth turning down at the corners with distaste. Natasha forced her eyes back to Lukin. He was impassive, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the document holder either.

“How do I know this is everything?” God, Ross was almost slavering.

“You don’t,” Tatiana said coolly. She paused, the folder a foot away from Ross’ trembling fingertips. “You’ll have to trust in my – self-interest.”

“And let’s say I’m not prepared to do that,” said Ross. “Let’s say I’d like a guarantee.”

“There isn’t one.” Tatiana shrugged. “Look. Every detail I have on every surviving Widow is in this folder. It’s yours, in exchange for the money and the identities. Or you can play silly buggers, and suffer for it.”

Ross glared. “You’re threatening me?”

“You’re a fool,” Tatiana said. “You want the Widows because they’ll give you power? Because there are no finer killers in the world? _Remember who you’re talking to_.”

That got through. Ross licked his lips. “Hand me the folder.”

“Why don’t I check the money first?” Natasha said lazily.

“It’s all there,” said Ross. “Cash, IDs, the lot. _Hand me the folder_.”

Tatiana took half a step back. Natasha wandered over to Lukin’s car and flipped open the briefcase; yes, the IDs looked genuine enough. At least the upper layer of cash was perfectly real. She tapped her finger on the briefcase lid. “Thank you, General Ross. Comrade Lukin.”

She shut the briefcase, and as if that had been a signal, half a dozen things happened at once: Ross lunged for the folder, snatching at it – Tatiana jumped back, drawing her gun out of her pants – Lukin spun around quick as a flash and kicked at Ross’ knee, grabbing his wrist at the same time, forcing his hand up – the gun fired off into the trees as Ross went down, and Tatiana shot Lukin in the shoulder almost simultaneously. When he staggered Natasha kicked him in the face and then lunged for Ross herself, throwing him off-balance and forcing the muzzle of the gun back up over their heads. Ross howled as her fingers closed around his, oh Steve had been right, she had no idea how much pressure she needed to exert on what, she’d probably broken half the bones in his hand – the gun went off again, and there was the ping of a ricochet, and Tony’s voice said irritably, “Hey! Go point that thing someplace else.”

Natasha punched Ross for good measure and sheer vindictiveness as Special Forces flooded the road; flashlights flicked on, and Tony did something to the suit so the reactor lights shone out again, a familiar steady blue that Natasha had once found comforting.

“Dime store knock-off?” he said, jerking his head in Tatiana’s general direction; but whether he meant the other girl or the Widows whose details were supposedly in the folder Natasha didn’t know. “Someone get these two up. Aleksander Lukin, you’re under arrest for espionage, murder, war crimes and just generally being a massive asshole. General Ross… tsk tsk.” He shook his head.

Ross was cradling his injured hand to his chest, but he didn’t hesitate. “He turned state’s evidence, he gave me information required to hunt down dangerous fugitives.”

“Oh, save it for the Senate committee,” said Tony. “Someone get them both out of here. Car’s around the corner,” he added to Natasha, “need a lift?”

As peace offerings went, she’d heard worse. Of course, she’d also heard better.

“Thanks,” she said, “but no thanks. Tanya and I are leaving.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Who is she?”

“Spy, murderer, war criminal,” Lukin said mockingly. He was on his knees, three guns trained on him; the soldiers slapped a rudimentary bandage on his gunshot wound before hauling him to his feet. “Come, Mr Stark, arrests all round! You’d better make a move, Romanov, because I’ll see both of you hang if you –”

If he’d been half a foot shorter, perhaps he would have lived. Natasha felt the air move in front of her face as the bullet whipped past. The impact made a sickening noise, louder than she’d ever heard it before, and blood and brain matter spattered across Tony’s suit.

“Sniper!” someone yelled, and then everyone was diving for cover and scattering into the trees. Ross was yelling; Tony’s men were fanning out, scrambling up the hillside looming above the road searching for the sniper’s nest.

“Get Ross out of here!” he shouted. “Nat, get _down_!”

There wasn’t any point. The bullet had come from the opposite direction to where she knew Bucky and Steve were set up. For endless seconds Natasha peered into darkness, head tilted up.

Tatiana knew who it had been, too.

“She’s gone,” she said quietly.

Natasha nodded.

“Fuck,” Tony muttered. “Seriously, him, armoured vehicle now, search the woods, FRIDAY, scanners? And the nearest car wash.” You couldn’t easily tell in this strange combination of headlamps and flashlights, but Natasha knew him: he was pale, and his very obnoxiousness meant he was shaken. “Two – _behind_?” He swung round, hand coming up; then he stopped, paler than ever.

Natasha didn’t turn around. Very calmly and very deliberately, she walked backwards two steps – three – placed herself between Steve and Bucky behind her and Tony in front.

He flinched.

“Thanks for your help,” Natasha said.

Tony said, “You’re welcome. Who shot him?”

“Nobody you need to worry about.”

“That doesn’t stop me worrying.”

Natasha shrugged. “I don’t much care. It’s a private matter.”

“A private little war?”

“More like an extended family row.”

“I don’t understand anything about you,” Tony said, annoyed.

“Sure you do. You just can’t be bothered to stop and think about it, because as long as your ego’s not affected you don’t give a damn about sweet Fanny Adams.”

Tony looked away. “So that’s it?”

Natasha grinned. “If the apocalypse comes, beep me.”

He snorted, but she didn’t think he recognised the line. “Seriously, I –”

“You know how to get a hold of Steve. He’ll always know how to get a hold of me.” That was a promise that neither Steve nor Bucky missed, she was sure.

Tony’s mouth pinched. For a long moment he looked past her – at Steve? At Bucky? She didn’t take her eyes off his face. Natasha Romanov, in that incarnation, had been in some ways much too sentimental about all the Avengers, but she had taken the usual precautions. The suit had vulnerabilities, and she knew exactly what each of them was. Natasha shifted her weight on the balls of her feet and breathed out, and breathed in. If Tony made a move – time to pick a priority, Romanov.

_It doesn’t matter how we stay together_ … No. No it didn’t matter. Natasha Romanov had hated herself for not being able to shut her rational mind down and walk away with Steve when she’d had the chance. She’d hated it even more that she’d been forced to admit to herself that she wasn’t that good a person after all; that, when push came to shove, doing what she believed was right had not been as important as protecting the people she loved.

Natalia Markova was much too old, and had lost far too much, to be anything but selfish now.

“Nothing to add?” Tony said, sardonic.

Silence. Someone took a step – Bucky said, “Shut up.” Steve had moved, then. Natasha didn’t let herself turn. Tatiana hovered behind Tony, gun in hand, near Lukin’s corpse; idly Natasha wondered what she would do if Tony made a wrong move here. After a moment Bucky said, “What do you want to hear?”

Strained, Tony said, “Lotta people would open with _hey man, sorry I murdered your parents_.”

Bucky snorted. “I’m not going to stand here and apologise to you for being tortured.” There was an edge to his voice as if he couldn’t decide whether to laugh out loud or start crying.

Tony’s lips peeled back from his teeth. “Oh _you’re_ the victim.” He had a vicious sneer, when he wanted it.

“No,” Bucky said, soft, thoughtful. A noise from Steve that sounded like a boiled kettle shrieking, or a wet and very angry cat. “But I didn’t choose the monster either.”

“Trite,” said Tony. “Poetic.”

“Oh, stop beating around the bush,” Bucky said, annoyed. “You’re not gonna arrest anyone: either try and kill me or leave.”

“ _Try_ ,” said Tony, sneering again.

“Don’t do it,” Natasha said flatly.

He turned on her at once. “Et tu, Brute?”

“Oh no, my dear,” she said, whisper-soft. “You cut that cord at Leipzig. You’ve not done a damn thing to mend it in nearly two years.”

For the first time Tony looked ashamed of himself. “I, uh.”

“I don’t care,” Natasha said again. “We’re done, Tony. Short of alien invasions, I won’t work with you again. And if you push me, I will push back.”

“And _this_ counts as pushing _you_?” He gestured angrily, meaning Bucky, Steve, Tatiana.

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

Natasha shrugged. “Steve made me a promise and I made one back.” What was between herself and Bucky was too precious to be spread out under Tony’s contemptuous gaze. Honestly, what was between herself and Steve was too, but at least that was something Tony had already known of, more or less.

Tony scowled. Natasha waited him out, patient. Bucky was right, there would be no arrests, and it was all an impasse until Tony could admit that to himself. He gave the whole road another furious once-over, searching for something to be angry at that had earned it, not quite able to look at Bucky, ignoring Tatiana, aware he would lose against Natasha.

Thus: Steve. But there wasn’t anything to say to Steve that hadn’t already been said, and Tony, for all his other faults, hated to repeat himself. After another few seconds he said, bitingly, “Off into the great unknown, then.”

“I told you,” Steve said quietly. “If you need me, I’ll be there.”

“Hah.” Tony glanced at Natasha again. “I’ll send a clean-up crew for him,” meaning Lukin. Then the helmet closed around his head, and he took off.

Natasha let out a long sigh, watching the streak of light rise up between the branches of the trees overhead and turn and vanish into the distant sky. The soldiers were still in the woods above them, and there was the sound of car engines running, moving away uphill. She was relieved it hadn’t come to blows, of course, but she felt lighter than she had in weeks, months, maybe even since Leipzig: she’d chosen her road and stuck with it.

No more vacillating.

When she looked back at the road Tatiana was watching her.

“So that was Tony Stark.”

“It was.”

“You really killed Howard?” Peering past Natasha at the guys.

“Yes,” Bucky said.

She snorted. “I never liked him,” as if that excused everything, made it OK. When the hell had she ever met Stark, anyway? Natasha bit her tongue on an angry remark. Steve made another wet cat noise, clearly just as determined not to say anything. Bucky was probably scowling. “He was a terrible lay, too.”

Silence. Natasha looked at her. Tatiana shrugged. Steve said, in a faintly strangled voice, “Notoriously, yeah,” and Bucky said, “Martha Tarrant swore blind he couldn’t have found her clit with both hands and a map,” and Tatiana said, “That sounds about right,” and Natasha said, “I really, _really_ need a drink.”

 

 

**IV.**

Markova had left no trace of herself, of course, and with Lukin’s body cooling on the asphalt and Tony’s contempt and anger ringing in Steve’s ears and Ross being dragged off to answer for his dubious friends in front of a Senate committee, the whole night had taken a surreally anticlimactic turn. It was Tatiana who hustled them back into the car and found a hotel in some unobtrusive village miles away from the – well, the scene of the crime – for them to hide in. She raised a sarcastic eyebrow when Natasha said, “We’ll share,” motioning at Steve and Bucky both, but stayed silent.

Once in the room Natasha made a beeline for the bathroom and locked the door behind herself. Steve stood by the bed surrounded by their bags and stared around, feeling helpless and useless both. Bucky examined the minibar with a gloomy look.

“None of this is gonna work, is it,” he said.

Steve said, “Nope. Tell you what will.” He rummaged in his duffle and produced the hip flask with a triumphant flourish.

Bucky raised an eyebrow.

“Asgardian booze,” said Steve.

“Space aliens make booze,” said Bucky. He unscrewed the top, sniffed at it, and sipped. “Oh wow.”

“I know,” said Steve, grinning.

“Steve,” Bucky said.

“Yeah?”

“You’ve met space aliens.”

Steve tried not to laugh, really he did, but when he’d taken a gulp himself and felt the lovely hot liquid sunshine of it burn deliciously down his throat he had to give in.

“I’ve met space aliens.”

“That is _amazing_.”

“I know!”

“The future,” Bucky said solemnly, “is amazing.”

“I know.” Steve collapsed onto the big double bed, fizzy with drink, and bounced, deliberately. Bucky kicked his boots off and joined him, sprawling against the pillows; Steve crawled up to sit next to him, and they passed the flask back and forth like they’d passed stolen beers as adolescents, staring at the ugly wallpaper. Natasha was running a bath, by the sound of it. “There’s cars that drive themselves. And we’ve been to the moon. And have you _seen_ New York now.”

“I can get on a plane and fly around the world to anywhere I want,” said Bucky gleefully. “And the internet is –” He waved a hand. “Everything you could ever need to know, _right there_.”

“Music,” Steve said solemnly.

“The music is _great_.”

“So’s the food.”

“Oh yeah.” Bucky heaved a sigh. “You know, I knew all this. In theory.”

“I know,” said Steve. “But it just kind of exists, and mocks you with how great it could be, and then – suddenly.”

“Suddenly, you roll over and you remember that space aliens really exist. Like, actually. To talk to. And steal booze from.”

“They invaded.”

“Fucking spaceships,” said Bucky, hugely delighted.

“You nerd,” said Steve.

“I’ve watched a lot of Star Trek,” said Bucky. “And oh my god, Steve, the movies. The _movies_. They make ‘em on computers and they’re in 3D, and computers, incidentally, no longer take up a whole damn room, they fit in your pocket. In your _pocket_.”

Steve heaved a sigh. “The future’s great.”

“It’s not even illegal to be queer.”

“In most places.” Steve thought about that remark for a second. “You mean –?”

“Well,” said Bucky.

“Huh,” said Steve.

“Yeah,” said Bucky.

Steve snorted. “You had to die before you thought you could mention that to me?”

“Eh,” Bucky said – he’d slumped sideways into Steve’s shoulder, a warm comforting weight all along Steve’s left side, still smelling faintly of aftershave and cheap shampoo, even after the day they’d had. He pulled his gloves off slowly, tugging the fingertips one by one and then tossing them onto the mattress by his knees. Steve reached out and took a hold of his left hand.

“It’s really gorgeous.”

“Hah.” Bucky flexed his fingers, did something that made the plates slide, a smooth movement like a ripple. Steve was fascinated, turning his hand over to examine his knuckles, the wrist, then his palm again – it and the fingers were roughened for a better grip, the plates imitating the heel of a flesh hand, the balls of the fingers. “Stop tickling.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right.” Bucky heaved a sigh. “What have you been doing, all this time?”

Steve sighed too. “Not very much,” he said. “Learning how to live in the world I suppose.” He shrugged. “Spend a lot of time with the Bartons, actually. Sometimes information about Hydra operations mysteriously reaches me, and by mysteriously I mean through Pepper, because Tony – well. And I’ll go and poke around and break a few jaws.” He laughed quietly. “T’Challa stays out of it, but I think he likes to keep an eye on me, so he gets in touch every now and then. I’m not sure if we’re friends or if I’m the stray feral cat he doesn’t want getting into his garden and ruining the flower beds.”

“Stray feral cat,” Bucky said. “Definitely.”

Steve laughed helplessly. “Hey,” he said. “You know – every mother-in-law joke ever made in the world has just come true for you.”

Bucky made that choking noise he’d always made whenever he thought he shouldn’t find something funny, but then it burst out of him after all, and he put his hand over his mouth to stifle it so Tasha wouldn’t hear. The tap had stopped; every now and then you heard the bathwater slosh, and through the gap under the door a sweet warm smell of bubble bath – something musky – was rising in the room, probably only noticeable if you had enhanced senses. Steve pictured her leaning back with her hair pinned up, relaxing at last. _I love you, you stupid jerk_. Suddenly he felt like crying – exhaustion, and relief; the knowledge that it was over. There was a hot lump in his throat, and his eyes burned; he blinked it away angrily.

“You’ve always been an emotional drunk,” Bucky said.

“Shut up,” Steve said.

Bucky snorted. He was red-faced still with that stifled fit of laughter, and Steve thought that right now Bucky was probably an emotional drunk too.

“By the way.” Bucky screwed the top of the flask back on and set it on the bedside table, and Steve knew, right then, what he was going to say.

“No,” he said.

“Shut your stupid mouth.”

“Won’t. Don’t you dare. Don’t even think it. You said you never wanted –”

“I still don’t,” said Bucky. “But I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe, and Natalia.” He poked at Steve’s knee. “Anyway, that’s not the point.”

“Then what is? You and Nat, you could vanish, go anywhere –”

“That tactic didn’t work so well when I was a mess, it’s not gonna work now. For starters, we’d never see you.”

“Don’t fucking do this for me!”

“God you’re arrogant.” Bucky was amused. “I’m not. I’m doing it because I would _like_ to spend some _time_ with my best friend.”

From time to time he did insist on saying that sort of thing out loud, and every time it floored Steve utterly. He hadn’t had an answer for it in the pub in London either.

Bucky patted his knee. “Yeah. Chew on that for a little, ey?”

Steve drew a breath – held it for a moment, and then sighed instead of speaking, some tension sliding out of him as he did so. “Hey –”

“Hmm?”

“I missed you.”

Bucky smiled. “I missed you too.”

When Natasha got out of the bath at last – in her nightdress, loose-limbed, her skin still pink with the hot water – they were watching game shows on TV and arguing about Thai food. Steve was for, Bucky was against; it was Steve’s contention that this was because Bucky was just really shit at picking restaurants.

“Isn’t there some reality show on where stupid people do terrible things to each other so we can point at them and laugh and feel better about our own messed-up lives?” Natasha asked.

Steve tossed her the remote. Natasha caught it in her right hand and tugged at the duvet with her left. “Up, c’mon.”

She snuck into the middle while Steve and Bucky were both undressing and using the bathroom. As Steve cleaned his teeth he could hear them talking quietly. When he came out Bucky was sitting on the side of the bed, cupping Tasha’s face in his hands; they were kissing. Buck had stripped to his underwear; there was a t-shirt in his lap, and the dimmed lights made his pale skin glow, outlined the solidity of that strong body – solidity Steve had leaned on all his life. For the first time he had a semi-decent view of those terrible scars… Natasha’s hands seemed very small on Bucky’s bicep, his chest; she flexed her fingers against his pectoral and rubbed at his chest hair a little, teasing. He was smiling when they drew apart, her expression soft and warm. Rapt, Steve watched his thighs as he stood, the ripple of muscles in his back and shoulders as he pulled the t-shirt on.

Then he gave himself a shake, walked round the bed to climb in the other side. Natasha had no compunctions about – well – cuddling, her body as warm as Bucky’s, softly curved where he was hard muscle. Her hair was a little damp, and the smell of her bubble bath – or lotion? – filled Steve’s nostrils.

“Are you OK?” Steve asked quietly.

She shrugged, laughing a little. “I think I have to be. What’s the alternative, another crying fit?”

“Sometimes they help.”

“Dearest,” she said, amused. “Much as I love you, I think I’ll skip your advice on dealing with emotional issues. There’s no one close I want to punch.”

Steve groaned. “All right, all right, my credibility is gone.” He slumped down into the pillows, and Natasha reached up and scratched at his beard. It was – nice. He turned his face into her fingers. “You always said if I grew one people would never recognise me.”

“No,” she agreed. “People fixate on aspects of your appearance – just being out of uniform and changing your walk stops most of them noticing you. And it suits you.”

Steve rubbed at it, trying to hide that he was pleased. “You think?”

“Yep. Shape of your face is just right for it.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“What, uh – have you and Bucky – talked?” Don’t leave again, he wanted to say; come back with me, stay.

“Oh no,” Natasha said. “You mean, he wants to hang out with you? I didn’t know you liked each other.”

“ _Nat_.” Of all the times to joke. His hands were clammy.

“Steve,” she mocked him. “Don’t worry, dear, I won’t leave you both by the side of the road and run off with the car.”

Steve snorted. “Not unless you had a bet to win.”

“Even then, I’d make sure you had the cab fare.” Natasha turned a wide-eyed look on him that made him snigger.

“Uh-huh.”

“How dare you.”

“Oh, you know.”

“I do, as it happens.” She smiled at him – a proper smile that lit her face up and softened her eyes and curved her mouth beautifully. Steve brushed her hair back from her face without thinking, and her eyelids dropped, long lashes dark against her cheek.

Distantly he thought, _uh-oh_. Then, the thought wandering in several hours after the first one, he thought, _too late_. And, hell, staring at Bucky earlier like he was a five-course meal and Steve was a starving man.

Natasha said, “Stop thinking so loudly, will you.”

Steve gave himself another shake. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Hmm?” Bucky said, coming back out of the bathroom. Steve realised he hadn’t even noticed the noise of the water running, the sound of Bucky brushing his teeth.

“Nothing,” Natasha said. “Come to bed, love.”

“Uh-huh.” Bucky turned the lights off and crawled into bed, sighing. He flung his arm across Natasha’s hips, fingers brushing Steve’s stomach. The bed was very warm with all three of them in it, and slowly the sound of the others breathing lulled each of them to sleep.

+++

The next morning Steve took himself off shortly after breakfast – ostensibly because he was restless and needed to get out and wander around for a while; Natasha suspected that he was trying to be diplomatic. Tatiana went back to her room, announcing that she was going to sleep the rest of the day, and Bucky and Natasha left the hotel and found themselves a quiet café in the village where they sat outside in the sunshine and drank coffee and smiled at each other.

“I’m all right,” Natasha said before he could ask. “I really am.”

“I’m not sure if we ought to expect a list of demands or what,” Bucky said.

“From Maman? No. She wanted Lukin dead; he is. She just needed someone to do the dirty work of actually drawing him out.” And – how shockingly convenient – the cameras in the car last night proved conclusively that none of the people Natasha loved had done it. Grand-mère herself could not have contrived more neatly to rescue her recalcitrant descendants while remaining to all appearances aloofly uncompromised by the situation. _As long as Natalia loves me, Irina will keep me alive_. Yes, all _right_. Natasha threw the towel in, metaphorically speaking. Maman would keep Steve alive too, and Clint and Laura and the children, just as she had the other Widows – by means fair or foul, even when they might not want her to – because of Natasha.

Memory, again: lavender scent and warm furs and strong arms around her, lifting her off her feet right there on the station platform in the steam and the smoke, jostled by hurrying passengers _. Natasha, my Natashenka. How I’ve missed you, little spider_.

“Hmm,” said Bucky. He was swirling his coffee in the half-empty cup, elbow on the table, his left hand still on the table top, eyes far away. Natasha reached out and slid her fingers between his, feeling the leather of his glove against her skin.

“I can’t turn her in,” she said quietly. “She’ll tell them everything if I do, she’ll put it all up there.” The lists of her own crimes hardly mattered – she’d made the start on that herself – nor the war, her childhood, but Maman would not stop there: Nikolai, Rose – Bucky. “We’ll tell T’Challa – I don’t know _what_ we’ll tell him. But I can’t turn her in.”

“It’s all right,” Bucky said, squeezing her fingers between his own. “Don’t – she’s your mother, you think I’m gonna go out there and –”

“You think I care about her?” She was puzzled.  

“Oh, what’s that got to do with family,” said Bucky, annoyed.

Natasha was startled into a laugh. “Aren’t you philosophical.”

He took hold of her wrist and turned her palm up to kiss it, smiling. “And the girls?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. I want to check on them, but it’s not really safe. It’d draw attention.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking. Tatiana might check on them.”

“I think so,” Natasha agreed. “She puts up a good front, but that’s all it is… we’ll have to make sure to stay in touch.” She grinned.

Bucky laughed. “I think we’d better… Natalia – listen.”

“Don’t tell me. You’re going with Steve.”

Bucky gestured, what can you do. He was still smiling, though it grew crooked. “He’s my friend.”

“I know that. He’s mine too.”

“You know, it’s funny. It’s such a coincidence, the two of you… Of course my two favourite people adore each other.”

Natasha laughed and looked away, her hair falling around her face. “Uh-huh.”

“Will you come?”

He was being very careful, wasn’t he. She wasn’t sure if it was touching or insulting. “Darling, of course.”

“I really don’t have anything to offer you, you know, beyond the distinct possibility of being arrested.”

She laughed again. “I’m in no better position. Listen. I’m done with wait and see. I love you and I want to keep you.”

Bucky closed his eyes a moment. “I love you too.”

And just like that she was blushing again and giddy. “I guess we’re jumping.”

“Looks like.” They were still holding hands; he squeezed hers gently. “Champagne to celebrate?”

Natasha snorted.

“No, I mean it. You know the last time I drank champagne?”

“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning!”

“We’re mad foreigners, no one will care.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Live a little, darling. Your mother’s just given us a new lease on it. Should I send her flowers?”

“Only if you want to die.” Natasha groaned as he ordered the bubbly – the waitress gave them both a hugely amused look – but his good mood was infectious, and the champagne was very nice indeed. She regretted that it didn’t give her a buzz, but there was always Asgardian booze.

“We should sell the house in Stalingrad,” she said suddenly. “Set up home somewhere the median annual temperature is at least twenty degrees higher.”

“Greece,” Bucky said. “Where was that island… we tracked down that mole.”

“Oh, in ’76! Greece was lovely.”

“Sunshine, blue sea.”

“You’re right. We’ll do it.”

“Uh-huh.”

They certainly wouldn’t. He would never get the sand out of the rills of his arm. Happy silence settled over them; Natasha turned her face into the sunlight, sighing, relaxing back against the chair, and closed her eyes. He pressed his leg against hers under the table, still playing with her hand.

After a few sweet minutes, Bucky said thoughtfully, “About the Bartons –”

“Hmm?”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“Everything,” Natasha said at last. “I owe them that.”

“All right. And the others?”

She cracked one eye open. “Why?”

“Well,” he said, “about –”

“Are you embarrassed?” Rather gleefully.

“No,” he said, indignant. “I was just thinking, it’s _private_. But I don’t mind telling your friends.”

“Are you sure?”

“If you trust ‘em, I trust ‘em.”

“All right.” She smiled again, lazy and contented and in love. First time sitting in a café together doing nothing; first time drinking champagne together. They didn’t speak much – everything important had been settled – just sat and smiled at each other and held hands on the table top, until Steve arrived and made their little circle complete.  

 

 

  **V.**

The café was in Montmartre, and the awnings above the cluster of chairs and tables in front of the windows boasted that it was a hundred and fifty years old. Overhead the trees were turning brown and gold and red, and a keen autumn wind had bit at her face and legs all the way down the wide wind-channel boulevards. Natasha picked her way between tables thronged with tourists, wincing at the noise – sometimes she was more aware of her newly-enhanced senses than others, and today the Babel of languages on the Paris streets and in the Metro refused to be shut out. The waiter in his smart waistcoat and tie greeted her with a little bow, and her hair flashed very red in the mirrors on the walls, catching her eye.

Maman was reading the newspaper, dressed for all the world like a rich Parisian housewife, her legs demurely crossed at the knee and her hair carefully pinned in place. The streaks of grey emphasised the smoothness of her face, the grace of her hands; the deux-piece she wore was impeccable black, her pearls glinting in the ruffles of her blouse. Natasha was uncomfortably aware of her own neat curls, her gloves, the wrap she wore over her dress.

“Feeling nostalgic?” she said wryly, settling into her chair.

Maman folded her newspaper and put it on the bench beside her. “Maman used to bring me here whenever we came to Paris,” she said. It was years since Natasha had heard that deep, husky voice, and it shivered through her, her mother’s voice. “I would stand at the patisserie counter on my tiptoes and the chef would make a little bow, and teach _la petite Romanovskaya_ the names of all the pastries. When my father died and she packed up and came back to Paris for good I felt she’d… given up, I suppose. Abandoned me; abandoned the whole country.” She waved a hand, dismissing the revelation in the same breath that she made it. “And now _this_ place is a theme park for posterity, and Russia is… what it is. Champagne?”

“I think I’d better,” Natasha said. “I have a migraine coming on already.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Maman, with more than a touch of Grand-mère’s briskness. “Your soldier is well?”

“He’s not a possession.”

“And now you’re obtuse. The serum worked?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Leipzig worried me rather. I assume you can keep Captain Rogers from doing any more damage.”

Natasha said, “Am I here to be lectured?”

Maman looked amused. “I’m tempted. I was very annoyed when you put yourself right back in harm’s way by joining SHIELD. No, no lectures. I simply dislike being made to worry that worms like Lukin might crawl out of the woodwork at any given moment because you’ve drawn attention to things you should have left buried.”

So much for no lectures. Natasha gritted her teeth. “If you hadn’t wiped me, perhaps I would have known better.”

Maman gave her a look. Natasha crossed her arms over her chest as the waiter appeared with their drinks and fell into sullen, adolescent silence. When the waiter had gone and they had toasted each other, for form’s sake, Maman said, “You’ve never known better. When you found out about Department X your first instinct was to throw it all over and skip off to West Berlin to tell the whole world. It was all I could do to keep you alive.”

“I remember,” Natasha said slowly. “You persuaded me to work with the girls, and then…”

“The more you saw the more you hated it. I don’t know how you ever relaxed long enough to fall for Barnes.” Maman had the audacity to grin, as if it were a fond memory.

Natasha polished off her champagne in a single gulp, wishing it affected her, and lifted the bottle out of the cooler to pour herself more; the familiar movements – lifting off the stopper, fitting her thumb into the depression at the bottom of the bottle – kept her from screaming.

“I so hate you,” she said at last.

“I’m sure,” Maman said. “That’s hardly relevant. What of Kirilova?”

Natasha blinked. “Unhurt.”

“She isn’t with you?”

“She has her own life.” Well, right now she was checking on the girls, but that wasn’t the point.

“Hah!” Maman said darkly. She didn’t explain. “Are the other samples secured?”

Ahhhh. Natasha put her glass down, grinning. “So that’s what you’re after. Yes. They’re secured. That is to say, they’re destroyed.”

For the first time in her life she’d made her mother speechless. Irina Markova went white to the lips. It was several seconds before she’d recovered herself, and Natasha thoroughly enjoyed every single one.

“That was hasty,” she said eventually.

Natasha propped her chin on her hand, sniggering. “No, not really.”

“The things you could do with it – cure disease, save countless –”

“Oh hell. Have you become a humanitarian in your old age? I thought you hated all this mystic enhanced humans bullshit.”

Maman tossed her champagne back and poured herself another glass – it still affected her, Natasha remembered, unless she’d pinched a sample herself before she locked the others up. “I do. I despise it. I think it’s unworthy of us. It’s Nazism, pure and simple. If we’re going to succeed, we’ll do it on our own terms… if it had been up to me Stark would have died six months _before_ completing his research, and all his files would have gone up in flames.” There was a funny twist to her mouth as she sipped her champagne, and suddenly Natasha knew exactly why Maman had sent Bucky to kill Howard: she’d hoped the sight of his old friend would break the wipe, and the mission would fail – conveniently removing both versions of the serum from Lukin’s grasp for good… Breathless, Natasha looked away. She had to clench her hands in her lap to stop herself from throwing a punch.

When she didn’t speak, Maman hmmed. “I know perfectly well that you’ve always found it difficult to look past the end of your own nose,” she said dryly, “but the point of all of it was always to build something better.”

Yes, well. Natasha had believed that herself, once. But she’d never quite climbed to the level of fanaticism required to believe that the end absolutely justified the means. She swirled the champagne in her glass, barely realising she was copying the habit from Bucky, searching for words suitably neutral for this public place, struggling to keep her tone even. “It’s not your place to decide what _better_ means. You can’t stop people being people.”

“Lord, save me from a repeat performance of my adolescent daughter’s nascent interest in philosophy,” said Maman fondly. She had always been good at making you forget what was underneath the polished, witty conversation, the impeccable façade. Her mouth twisted again, too slight an expression to call it a grimace. “ _People_ , bah. They don’t know the half of what’s good for them. We razed this world” – she gestured with the champagne glass, meaning all the _ancien regime_ that this café had seen come and go – “to the ground, and instead of fetching out our tools and sketching a plan and using all the bricks to rebuild, we played kickball in the rubble. That was a mistake. But _people_!”

Such contempt. Other people would have expressed regret for causing the destruction in the first place, probably. Maman didn’t regret, on the whole. She set her jaw and changed her path and pretended it was the one she’d been aiming for all along.

Natasha sighed. “What do you want?”

Maman sighed too. “To see you.”

“Well,” Natasha said. “You’ve seen me.”

Long thoughtful silence as they looked at each other. Natasha was irritated to remember that she had Maman’s eyes, her thick curling hair, the shape of her jaw. Whatever the other woman was thinking, not a sign of it showed on that calm, almost ageless face.

At last Maman said quietly, “I have. You look well, little spider. I’m glad.”

“No thanks to you,” Natasha said gently. Then she stood up, dropping the cash for the champagne on the table. “Goodbye, Maman.”

She tucked her chair neatly under the table and tugged her gloves back on. Maman watched her in silence. What had Natasha been expecting? Thanks? Tearful apologies all round? She didn’t have the guts to ask about the Rio bombing… This was her mother. If Maman asked – if she even hinted – but Maman would never change. You couldn’t make peace with someone who just didn’t _care_ , because the difference between peace and war meant nothing to them.

But you could walk away from them. It was surprisingly easy, after all these years, after all the pain and the lies and the false memories… there was no longer any reason not to. If there were any gaps left in what Natasha knew of herself, well, she could live with them.  

When she was halfway across the café Maman said quietly, “ _Au revoir_.”

Natasha didn’t turn back.

+++

The guys were out – maybe already in the park – the room was a mess, the bed unmade; they’d hung the do not disturb sign on the door, in case any enterprising maid stumbled across anyone’s guns. There was something anticipatory about that unmade bed, a fact that none of the three of them were quite ready to admit to, in so many words. Not just yet. Soon, very soon, and when they did… Nervousness again, the breathlessness of that heartbeat before you took a jump out of a plane. And just like parachuting, the fall would be spectacular. But not yet.

Natasha had made a couple of stops on the way back to the hotel, and now she was going to be late, which annoyed her. But it couldn’t be helped. She flung her pretty things in a heap, showered and washed the curls out of her hair, and dressed again in her new clothes, her actual clothes: jeans and a shirt and a heavy jacket, the leather stiff and new. Boots… for a moment she stared at herself in the mirror, and then she ran a brush through her hair and let it hang loose, not even bothering with hairspray. The park was a twenty-minute walk away. It was off to change her body language again, to settle, deliberately, back into Natasha Romanov’s skin. Maman had made the girl, but Natalia had made her her own…

It felt good.

Lila’s shriek cut right through her. “Auntie Nat, Auntie Nat!” And an instant later Natasha had a warm wriggling armful of goddaughter; she swung her round and kissed her delightedly.

“Hi, gorgeous.”

“Where have you beeeeeeeen,” Lila demanded. “Mom and Dad said it was the secretest secret mission _ever_ , and Steve said it was all magic and aliens.”

“You want to remember not to believe the things Steve tells you,” Natasha said, laughing. God, Lila had shot up like a weed – so had Coop, standing by the bench a few feet away with Laura and the guys; Laura was holding Nate on her hip and talking to Bucky, who was being a little formal and very polite and smiling at the baby. Not a baby anymore. Coop was glowering at Natasha, clearly pissed off, and old enough to not really believe the secret mission excuse, not for over a year. Well, he had every right to be angry. And Clint was coming towards her, sunglasses on his nose.

“Shove off, Lila,” he said, and tugged on her ponytail; she stuck her tongue out at him and ran back to Laura.

“Hi,” Natasha said.

“You’re hopeless,” said Clint. “You’re more trouble than those three put together.”

“I know. I made a mistake, and I’m sorry.”

Clint heaved a sigh. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too. I was just, I was furious. About Wanda… and I’ve been where Barnes is, at least kinda. It wasn’t fair. Hell, nobody arrested _me_. It pissed me off. But I shoulda called you, I should have made Steve call you. I’m sorry for that.” He smiled at her, and hot relief rose up in Natasha’s chest.

“I should have pushed.”

Clint shook his head. “You were trying to protect us, and we made it impossible. Well, Tony didn’t help.” He pulled a face. “Asshole.”

“He’s trying,” Natasha said.

“He’s very trying,” Clint said dryly. “I mean, I get it. He doesn’t trust himself so he keeps trying to make other people responsible for telling him _no_. But that’s not how it works.”

“I know,” Natasha said. “But we don’t get to act as if no one’s allowed to tell us no, either.”

Clint smiled again. “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you how much I admire you for being able to take that stance after everything you’ve been through.”

“Oh, crap!” Natasha said angrily.

He laughed at her. “Come here.”

She flung her arms around his neck, and he lifted her off her feet and held her tight, making her laugh. Same aftershave as always. Natasha let herself hide her face in his neck for a second or ten. Not that she’d wish Irina on anyone else, but as a child she had always wanted an older brother...

“Hey,” she said when he put her down.

“Yeah?”

“I’d like to tell you about something. A very long story, in fact. And there’s someone I’d like for us to keep in touch with…”

“OK,” Clint said. “Well, we’re not going anywhere, are we.” He put his arm across her shoulders, and they walked back to the others, where Coop graciously allowed a hug.

“What happened?” he said, sulky and suspicious.

“I made a mistake,” Natasha said again, very calm.

“Hmm.” He crossed his arms over his chest.

“Coop,” said Clint.

“It’s all right,” Natasha said.

“Secret alien magic missions?” Coop said, with a sidelong glance at Lila.

“I’ll tell you everything,” Natasha said. “I promise.”

“Well. OK then.”

She grinned at him and ruffled his hair the way she knew he hated, and he batted her hand away, groaning, and then it was Laura’s turn.

She kissed Natasha’s cheek. “Hey you.” She was smiling, but Natasha could see the hurt in the tightness around her eyes.

Quietly, Natasha said, “Have I said sorry?”

“Not yet.” Laura drew a breath and let it out in a sudden huff. “Has he?”

“Only once.” Natasha squinted at her. Laura didn’t seem angry, but of course disappointment was worse, because there was no room for a fight, so you couldn’t get all self-righteous defending yourself. Natasha said, “I was trying to do ten different things at once, and I messed them all up. I’m sorry.”

Laura smiled. “Even you can outsmart yourself, apparently.”

Natasha smiled back. “Apparently.”

“Very comforting for us ordinary mortals.” Laura sighed. Then she put the baby in her arms and rubbed Natasha’s shoulder. “The rest later? I’m just glad you’re OK.”

“You too,” Natasha said quietly, and gave Nate a bounce. “Hey, kiddo. Remember me?”

Nate said, “No,” and promptly tried to play with her hair.

Natasha said, “Yeah, I get that a lot,” grinning at Bucky, who groaned at her and kicked Steve in the shins when he started laughing.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
